Dear Mabel,
It is mid-afternoon here in France several weeks after D-Day. Shells from heavy artillery are humming overhead and the sounds of shells bursting are coming from all directions in the not-so-far-off distance. The regiment I'm with forms part of the front line.

On Sept. 1, 1939, Germanyinvaded Poland. On September 3 Englandand Francedemanded that Germanywithdraw its troops. When Germanyrefused Englandand Francedeclared war on Germany. World War Two was on.

Within a week Great Britain was joined in the war by Canada , Australia , New Zealand , the Union of South Africa, and India . Ireland ( Eire ) was the only member of the British Commonwealth to keep out of the war.

The start of the war climaxed a series of warlike acts between 1931 and 1939 by Germany, Italy , and Japan . The acts of these aggressor nations included taking territories that did not belong to them.

The United States had protested the actions of these countries. England and France , however, agreed to let the German dictator Adolf Hitler and the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini take the territories they wanted. The British and French hoped this policy of appeasement would prevent another war.

Along with World War I,
World War II was one of the great watersheds of 20th-century geopolitical
history. It resulted in the extension of the Soviet Union's power to nations of
eastern Europe, enabled a Communist movement eventually to achieve power in
China, and marked the decisive shift of power in the world away from the states
of western Europe and toward the United States and the Soviet Union.

Axis initiative
and Allied reaction

The outbreak of
war

World War II:
Axis and Allied movements in Europe and North Africa, 1940-42

By the
early part of 1939 the
German dictator
Adolf Hitler had become determined to
invade and occupy
Poland. Poland, for its part, had
guarantees of French and British military support should it be attacked by
Germany. Hitler intended to invade Poland anyway, but first he had to neutralize
the possibility that the Soviet Union would resist the invasion of its western
neighbour. Secret negotiations led on August 23-24 to the signing of the
German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact in
Moscow. In a secret protocol of this pact, the Germans and the Soviets agreed
that Poland should be divided between them, with the western third of the
country going to Germany and the eastern two-thirds being taken over by the
U.S.S.R.

Having achieved
this cynical agreement, the other provisions of which stupefied Europe even
without divulgence of the secret protocol, Hitler thought that Germany could
attack Poland with no danger of Soviet or British intervention and gave orders
for the invasion to start on August 26. News of the signing, on August 25, of a
formal treaty of mutual assistance between Great Britain and Poland (to
supersede a previous though temporary agreement) caused him to postpone the
start of hostilities for a few days. He was still determined, however, to ignore
the diplomatic efforts of the western powers to restrain him. Finally, at 12:40
PM on Aug. 31, 1939, Hitler ordered hostilities against Poland to start at 4:45
the next morning. The invasion began as ordered. In response, Great
Britain and
France declared war on Germany on
September 3, at 11:00 AM and at 5:00 PM, respectively. World War II had begun.

Forces and resources of the European combatants, 1939

In September 1939 the
Allies, namely Great Britain, France,
and Poland, were together superior in industrial resources, population, and
military manpower, but the German Army, or
Wehrmacht, because of its armament,
training, doctrine, discipline, and fighting spirit, was the most efficient and
effective fighting force for its size in the world. The index of military
strength in September 1939 was the number of divisions that each nation could
mobilize. Against Germany's 100 infantry divisions and six armoured divisions,
France had 90 infantry divisions in metropolitan France, Great Britain had 10
infantry divisions, and Poland had 30 infantry divisions, 12 cavalry brigades,
and one armoured brigade (Poland had also 30 reserve infantry divisions, but
these could not be mobilized quickly). A division contained from 12,000 to
25,000 men.

It was the qualitative
superiority of the German infantry divisions and the number of their armoured
divisions that made the difference in 1939. The firepower of a German infantry
division far exceeded that of a French, British, or Polish division; the
standard German division included 442 machine guns, 135 mortars, 72 antitank
guns, and 24 howitzers. Allied divisions had a firepower only slightly greater
than that of World War I. Germany had six armoured divisions in September 1939;
the Allies, though they had a large number of tanks, had no armoured divisions
at that time.

The six armoured, or
panzer, divisions of the Wehrmacht
comprised some 2,400 tanks. And though Germany would subsequently expand its
tank forces during the first years of the war, it was not the number of tanks
that Germany had (the Allies had almost as many in September 1939) but the fact
of their being organized into divisions and operated as such that was to prove
decisive. In accordance with the doctrines of General
Heinz Guderian, the German tanks were
used in massed formations in conjunction with motorized artillery to punch holes
in the enemy line and to isolate segments of the enemy, which were then
surrounded and captured by motorized German infantry divisions while the tanks
ranged forward to repeat the process: deep drives into enemy territory by panzer
divisions were thus followed by mechanized infantry and foot soldiers. These
tactics were supported by
dive bombers that attacked and
disrupted the enemy's supply and communications lines and spread panic and
confusion in its rear, thus further paralyzing its defensive capabilities.
Mechanization was the key to the German blitzkrieg, or "lightning war," so named
because of the unprecedented speed and mobility that were its salient
characteristics. Tested and well-trained in maneuvers, the German panzer
divisions constituted a force with no equal in Europe.

The German
Air Force, or
Luftwaffe, was also the best force of
its kind in 1939. It was a ground-cooperation force designed to support the
Army, but its planes were superior to nearly all Allied types. In the rearmament
period from 1935 to 1939 the production of German combat aircraft steadily
mounted. The
Table shows the production of German
aircraft by years.

The standardization of
engines and airframes gave the Luftwaffe an advantage over its opponents.
Germany had an operational force of 1,000 fighters and 1,050 bombers in
September 1939. The Allies actually had more planes in 1939 than Germany did,
but their strength was made up of many different types, some of them
obsolescent. The corresponding
Table shows the number of first-line
military aircraft available to the Allies at the outbreak of war.

Great Britain, which was
held back by delays in the rearmament program, was producing one modern fighter
in 1939, the Hurricane. A higher-performance fighter, the
Spitfire, was just coming into
production and did not enter the air war in numbers until 1940.

The value of the French
Air Force in 1939 was reduced by the number of obsolescent planes in its order
of battle: 131 of the 634 fighters and nearly all of the 463 bombers. France was
desperately trying to buy high-performance aircraft in the United States in
1939.
Technology

At sea the odds against
Germany were much greater in September 1939 than in August 1914, since the
Allies in 1939 had many more large surface warships than Germany had. At sea,
however, there was to be no clash between the Allied and the German massed
fleets but only the individual operation of German pocket battleships and
commerce raiders.

Technology of war, 1918-39

When World War I ended,
the experience of it seemed to vindicate the power of the defensive over the
offensive. It was widely believed that a superiority in numbers of at least
three to one was required for a successful offensive. Defensive concepts
underlay the construction of the Maginot Line between France and Germany and of
its lesser counterpart, the Siegfried Line, in the interwar years. Yet by 1918
both of the requirements for the supremacy of the offensive were at hand: tanks
and planes. The battles of Cambrai (1917) and Amiens (1918) had proved that when
tanks were used in masses, with surprise, and on firm and open terrain, it was
possible to break through any trench system.

The Germans learned this
crucial, though subtle, lesson from World War I. The Allies on the other hand
felt that their victory confirmed their methods, weapons, and leadership, and in
the interwar period the French and British armies were slow to introduce new
weapons, methods, and doctrines. Consequently, in 1939 the British Army did not
have a single armoured division, and the French tanks were distributed in small
packets throughout the infantry divisions. The Germans, by contrast, began to
develop large tank formations on an effective basis after their rearmament
program began in 1935.

In the air the technology
of war had also changed radically between 1918 and 1939. Military aircraft had
increased in size, speed, and range, and for operations at sea, aircraft
carriers were developed that were capable of accompanying the fastest surface
ships. Among the new types of planes developed was the dive bomber, a plane
designed for accurate low-altitude bombing of enemy strong points as part of the
tank-plane-infantry combination. Fast low-wing
monoplane fighters were developed in
all countries; these aircraft were essentially flying platforms for eight to 12
machine guns installed in the wings. Light and medium bombers were also
developed that could be used for the strategic bombardment of cities and
military strong points. The threat of bomber attacks on both military and
civilian targets led directly to the development of
radar in England. Radar made it
possible to determine the location, the distance, and the height and speed of a
distant aircraft no matter what the weather was. By December 1938 there were
five radar stations established on the coast of England, and 15 additional
stations were begun. So, when war came in September 1939, Great Britain had a
warning chain of radar stations that could tell when hostile planes were
approaching.

The war in Europe, 1939-41

The campaign in Poland, 1939

The German conquest of
Poland in September 1939 was the first demonstration in war of the new theory of
high-speed armoured warfare that had been adopted by the Germans when their
rearmament began. Poland was a country all too well suited for such a
demonstration. Its frontiers were immensely long--about 3,500 miles in all; and
the stretch of 1,250 miles adjoining German territory had recently been extended
to 1,750 miles in all by the German occupation of Bohemia-Moravia and of
Slovakia, so that Poland's southern flank became exposed to invasion--as the
northern flank, facing East Prussia, already was. Western Poland had become a
huge salient that lay between Germany's jaws.

It would have been wiser
for the Polish Army to assemble farther back, behind the natural defense line
formed by the Vistula and San rivers, but that would have entailed the
abandonment of some of the most valuable western parts of the country, including
the Silesian coalfields and most of the main industrial zone, which lay west of
the river barrier. The economic argument for delaying the German approach to the
main industrial zone was heavily reinforced by Polish national pride and
military overconfidence.

When war broke out the
Polish Army was able to mobilize about 1,000,000 men, a fairly large number. The
Polish Army was woefully outmoded, however, and was almost completely lacking in
tanks, armoured personnel carriers, and antitank and antiaircraft guns. Yet many
of the Polish military leaders clung to the double belief that their
preponderance of horsed cavalry was an important asset and that they could take
the offensive against the German mechanized forces. They also tended to discount
the effect of Germany's vastly superior air force, which was nearly 10 times as
powerful as their own.

The unrealism of such an
attitude was repeated in the Polish Army's dispositions. Approximately one-third
of Poland's forces were concentrated in or near the Polish Corridor (in
northeastern Poland), where they were perilously exposed to a double
envelopment--from East Prussia and the west combined. In the south, facing the
main avenues of a German advance, the Polish forces were thinly spread. At the
same time, nearly another one-third of Poland's forces were massed in reserve in
the north-central part of the country, between Lódz and Warsaw,
under the commander in chief, Marshal Edward Rydz-Smigly. The
Poles' forward concentration in general forfeited their chance of fighting a
series of delaying actions, since their foot-marching army was unable to retreat
to their defensive positions in the rear or to man them before being overrun by
the invader's mechanized columns.

The 40-odd infantry
divisions employed by the Germans in the invasion counted for much less than
their 14 mechanized or partially mechanized divisions: these consisted of six
armoured divisions; four light divisions, consisting of motorized infantry
(infantry wholly transported by trucks and personnel carriers) with two armoured
units; and four motorized divisions. The Germans attacked with about 1,500,000
troops in all. It was the deep and rapid thrusts of these mechanized forces that
decided the issue, in conjunction with the overhead pressure of the Luftwaffe,
which wrecked the Polish railway system and destroyed most of the Polish Air
Force before it could come into action. The Luftwaffe's terror-bombing of Polish
cities, bridges, roads, rail lines, and power stations completed the
disorganization of the Polish defenses.

On Sept. 1, 1939, the
German attack began. Against northern
Poland, General
Fedor von Bock commanded an army
group comprising General Georg von Küchler's 3rd Army, which struck southward
from East Prussia, and General
Günther von Kluge's 4th Army, which
struck eastward across the base of the Corridor. Much stronger in troops and in
tanks, however, was the army group in the south under General
Gerd von Rundstedt, attacking from
Silesia and from the Moravian and Slovakian border: General
Johannes Blaskowitz's 8th Army, on
the left, was to drive eastward against Lódz; General
Wilhelm List's 14th Army, on the
right, was to push on toward Kraków and to turn the Poles' Carpathian flank; and
General Walter von
Reichenau's 10th Army, in the centre,
with the bulk of the group's armour, was to deliver the decisive blow with a
northwestward thrust into the heart of Poland. By September 3, when Kluge in the
north had reached the Vistula and Küchler was approaching the Narew River,
Reichenau's armour was already beyond the Warta; two days later his left wing
was well to the rear of Lódz and his right wing at Kielce; and by
September 8 one of his armoured corps was in the outskirts of Warsaw, having
advanced 140 miles in the first week of war. Light divisions on Reichenau's
right were on the Vistula between Warsaw and Sandomierz by September 9, while
List, in the south, was on the San above and below Przemysl. At the same
time, the 3rd Army tanks, led by Guderian, were across the Narew attacking the
line of the Bug River, behind Warsaw. All the German armies had made progress in
fulfilling their parts in the great enveloping maneuver planned by General
Franz Halder, chief of the general
staff, and directed by General
Walther von Brauchitsch, the
commander in chief. The Polish armies were splitting up into uncoordinated
fragments, some of which were retreating while others were delivering disjointed
attacks on the nearest German columns.

On September 10 the Polish
commander in chief, Marshal Edward Rydz-Smigly, ordered a general
retreat to the southeast. The Germans, however, were by that time not only
tightening their net around the Polish forces west of the Vistula (in the Lódz
area and, still farther west, around Poznan) but also penetrating deeply
into eastern Poland. The Polish defense was already reduced to random efforts by
isolated bodies of troops when another blow fell: on Sept. 17, 1939, Soviet
forces entered Poland from the east. The next day, the Polish government and
high command crossed the Romanian frontier on their way into exile. The Warsaw
garrison held out against the Germans until September 28, undergoing
terror-bombings and artillery barrages that reduced parts of the city to rubble,
with no regard for the civilian population. The last considerable fragment of
the Polish Army resisted until October 5; and some guerrilla fighting went on
into the winter. The Germans took a total of 700,000 prisoners, and about 80,000
Polish soldiers escaped over neutral frontiers. Polish total casualties (killed,
wounded, and missing) remain unknown, while the Germans sustained about 45,000
casualties. Poland was conquered for partition between Germany and the U.S.S.R.,
the forces of which met and greeted each other on Polish soil. On September 28
another secret German-Soviet protocol modified the arrangements of August: all
Lithuania was to be a Soviet sphere
of influence, not a German one; but the dividing line in Poland was changed in
Germany's favour, being moved eastward to the Bug River.

Profiting quickly from its
understanding with Germany, the
U.S.S.R. on Oct. 10, 1939,
constrained
Estonia,
Latvia, and Lithuania to admit Soviet
garrisons onto their territories. Approached with similar demands,
Finland refused to comply, even
though the U.S.S.R. offered territorial compensation elsewhere for the cessions
that it was requiring for its own strategic reasons. Finland's armed forces
amounted to about 200,000 troops in 10 divisions. The Soviets eventually brought
about 70 divisions (about 1,000,000 men) to bear in their attack on Finland,
along with about 1,000 tanks. Soviet troops attacked Finland on Nov. 30, 1939.

The invaders succeeded in
isolating the little Arctic port of Petsamo in the far north but were
ignominiously repulsed on all of the fronts chosen for their advance. On the
Karelian Isthmus, the massive
reinforced-concrete fortifications of Finland's
Mannerheim Line blocked the Soviet
forces' direct land route from Leningrad into Finland. The Soviet planners had
grossly underestimated the Finns' national will to resist and the natural
obstacles constituted by the terrain's numerous lakes and forests.

The western powers exulted
overtly over the humiliation of the Soviet Union. One important effect of
Finland's early successes was to reinforce the tendency of both Hitler and the
western democracies to underestimate the Soviet military capabilities. But in
the meantime, the Soviet strategists digested their hard-learned military
lessons.

On Feb. 1, 1940, the
Red Army launched 14 divisions into a
major assault on the Mannerheim Line. The offensive's weight was concentrated
along a 10-mile sector of the line near Summa, which was pounded by a tremendous
artillery bombardment. As the fortifications were pulverized, tanks and
sledge-carried infantry advanced to occupy the ground while the Soviet Air Force
broke up attempted Finnish counterattacks. After little more than a fortnight of
this methodical process, a breach was made through the whole depth of the
Mannerheim Line. Once the Soviets had forced a passage on the Karelian Isthmus,
Finland's eventual collapse was certain. On March 6 Finland sued for peace, and
a week later the Soviet terms were accepted: the Finns had to cede the entire
Karelian Isthmus, Viipuri, and their part of the Rybachy Peninsula to the
Soviets. The Finns had suffered about 70,000 casualties in the campaign, the
Soviets more than 200,000.

During their campaign in
Poland, the Germans kept only 23 divisions in the west to guard their frontier
against the French, who had nearly five times as many divisions mobilized. The
French commander in chief, General
Maurice-Gustave Gamelin, proposed an
advance against Germany through neutral Belgium and The Netherlands, in order to
have room to exercise his ponderous military machine. He was overruled, however,
and French assaults on the 100-mile stretch of available front along the
Franco-German frontier had barely dented the German defenses when the collapse
of Poland prompted the recall of Gamelin's advanced divisions to defensive
positions in the Maginot Line (see below). From October 1939 to March 1940,
successive plans were developed for counteraction in the event of a German
offensive through Belgium--all of them based on the assumption that the Germans
would come across the plain north of Namur, not across the hilly and wooded
Ardennes. The Germans would indeed have taken the route foreseen by the French
if Hitler's desire for an offensive in November 1939 had not been frustrated, on
the one hand, by bad weather and, on the other, by the hesitations of his
generals; but in March 1940 the bold suggestion of General
Erich von Manstein that an offensive
through the Ardennes should, in fact, be practicable for tank forces was adopted
by Hitler, despite orthodox military opinion.

Meanwhile, Hitler's
immediate outlook had been changed by considerations about Scandinavia.
Originally he had intended to respect Norway's neutrality. Then rumours leaked
out, prematurely, of British designs on
Norway--as, in fact,
Winston Churchill, first lord of the
Admiralty, was arguing that
mines should be laid in Norwegian
waters to stop the export of Swedish iron ore from Gällivare to Germany through
Norway's rail terminus and port of Narvik. The British Cabinet, in response to
Churchill, authorized at least the preparation of a plan for a landing at Narvik;
and in mid-December 1939 a Norwegian politician,
Vidkun Quisling, leader of a pro-Nazi
party, was introduced to Hitler. On Jan. 27, 1940, Hitler ordered plans for an
invasion of Norway, for use if he could no longer respect Norway's neutrality.

After France's failure to
interrupt the German conquest of Poland, the western powers and the Germans were
so inactive with regard to land operations that journalists began to speak
derisively, over the next six months, of the
"phony war." At sea, however, the
period was somewhat more eventful. German
U-boats sank the British aircraft
carrier Courageous (September 17) and the battleship Royal Oak
(October 14). The U-boats' main warfare, however, was against merchant shipping:
they sank more than 110 vessels in the first four months of the war. Both the
Germans and the British, meanwhile, were engaged in extensive mine laying.

In surface warfare at sea,
the British were on the whole more fortunate than the Germans. A German pocket
battleship in the Atlantic, the Admiral Graf Spee sank nine ships
before coming to a tragic end: having sustained and inflicted damage in an
engagement with three British cruisers off the Río de la Plata on Dec. 13, 1939,
she made off to Montevideo and obtained leave to spend four days there for
repairs; the British mustered reinforcements for the two cruisers still capable
of action after the engagement, namely the Ajax and the Achilles,
and brought the Cumberland to the scene in time; but, on December 17,
when the Graf Spee put to sea again, her crew scuttled her a little way
out of the harbour before the fight could be resumed.

The invasion of Norway

British plans for landings
on the Norwegian coast in the third week of March 1940 were temporarily
postponed. Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain, however, was by
that time convinced that some aggressive action ought to be taken; and
Paul Reynaud, who succeeded Daladier
as France's premier on March 21, was of the same opinion. (Reynaud had come into
office on the surge of the French public's demand for a more aggressive military
policy and quicker offensive action against Germany.) It was agreed that mines
should be laid in Norwegian waters and that the mining should be followed by the
landing of troops at four Norwegian ports,
Narvik, Trondheim, Bergen, and
Stavanger.

Because of Anglo-French
arguments, the date of the mining was postponed from April 5 to April 8. The
postponement was catastrophic. Hitler had on April 1 ordered the German invasion
of Norway to begin on April 9; so, when on April 8 the Norwegian government was
preoccupied with earnest protest about the British mine laying, the German
expeditions were well on their way.

On April 9, 1940, the
major Norwegian ports from Oslo northward to Narvik (1,200 miles away from
Germany's naval bases) were occupied by advance detachments of German troops. At
the same time, a single parachute battalion (the first ever employed in warfare)
took the Oslo and Stavanger airfields, and 800 operational aircraft overawed the
Norwegian population. Norwegian resistance at Narvik, at Trondheim (the
strategic key to Norway), at Bergen, at Stavanger, and at Kristiansand had been
overcome very quickly; and Oslo's effective resistance to the seaborne forces
was nullified when German troops from the airfield entered the city.

Simultaneously, along with
their Norwegian enterprise, the Germans on April 9 occupied
Denmark, sending troopships, covered
by aircraft, into Copenhagen harbour and marching over the land frontier into
Jutland. This occupation was obviously necessary for the safety of their
communications with Norway.

Allied troops began to
land at Narvik on April 14. Shortly afterward, British troops were landed also
at Namsos and at Ĺndalsnes, to attack Trondheim from the north and from the
south, respectively. The Germans, however, landed fresh troops in the rear of
the British at Namsos and advanced up the Gudbrandsdal from Oslo against the
force at Ĺndalsnes. By this time the Germans had about 25,000 troops in Norway.
By May 2, both Namsos and Ĺndalsnes were evacuated by the British. The Germans
at Narvik held out against five times as many British and French troops until
May 27. By that time the German offensive in France had progressed to such an
extent that the British could no longer afford any commitment in Norway, and the
25,000 Allied troops were evacuated from Narvik 10 days after their victory. The
Norwegian king
Haakon VII and his government left
Norway for Britain at the same time. Hitler garrisoned Norway with about 300,000
troops for the rest of the war. By occupying Norway, Hitler had ensured the
protection of Germany's supply of iron ore from Sweden and had obtained naval
and air bases with which to strike at Britain if necessary.

What was to happen in
Norway became a less important question for the western powers when, on May 10,
1940, they were surprised by Hitler's long-debated stroke against them through
the Low Countries.

France's 800,000-man
standing army was thought at the time to be the most powerful in Europe. But the
French had not progressed beyond the defensive mentality inherited from World
War I, and they relied primarily on their
Maginot Line for protection against a
German offensive. The Maginot Line was an extremely well-developed chain of
fortifications running from the Swiss frontier opposite Basel northward along
the left bank of the Rhine and then northwestward no farther than Montmédy, near
the Belgian frontier south of the Ardennes Forest. The line consisted of a
series of giant pillboxes and other defensive installations constructed in
depth, equipped with underground supply and communications facilities, and
connected by rail lines, with all its heavy guns pointed east at the German
frontier. Depending heavily on the line as a defense against German attack, the
French had 41 divisions manning it or backing it, whereas only 39 divisions were
watching the long stretch of frontier north of it, from Montmédy through the
Ardennes and across Flanders to the English Channel.

In their plan for the
invasion of France and the Low Countries, the Germans kept General Wilhelm von
Leeb's Army Group C facing the Maginot Line so as to deter the French from
diverting forces from it, while launching Bock's Army Group B into the basin of
the Lower Maas River north of Ličge and Rundstedt's Army Group A into the
Ardennes. Army Group B comprised Küchler's 18th Army, with one armoured division
and airborne support, to attack The Netherlands, and Reichenau's 6th, with two
armoured divisions, to advance over the Belgian plain. These two armies would
have to deal not only with the Dutch and Belgian armies but also with the forces
that the Allies, according to their plan, would send into the Low Countries,
namely two French armies and nine British divisions. Rundstedt's Army Group A,
however, was much stronger, comprising as it did Kluge's 4th Army, List's 12th,
and General Ernst Busch's 16th, with General Maximilian von Weichs's 2nd in
reserve, besides a large armoured group under
Kleist and a smaller one under
General Hermann Hoth, and amounting in all to 44 divisions, seven of them
armoured, with 27 divisions in reserve. Army Group A thus amounted to more than
1,500,000 men and more than 1,500 tanks, and it would strike at the weak hinge
of the Allies' wheel into Belgium--that is to say, at two French armies, General
Charles Huntziger's 2nd and General André Corap's 9th, which together mustered
only 12 infantry and four horsed cavalry divisions and stood, respectively, east
and west of Sedan on the least-fortified stretch of the French frontier. Against
this weak centre of the Allied line were thus massed nearly two-thirds of
Germany's forces in the west and nearly three-quarters of its tank forces.

The Dutch Army comprised
10 divisions and the equivalent of 10 more in smaller formations, and thus
totaled more than 400,000 men. It apparently had a good chance of withstanding
the German invasion, since the attacking German army comprised only seven
divisions, apart from the airborne forces it would use. The Dutch, however, had
a wide front, a very sensitive and loosely settled rear, very few tanks, and no
experience of modern warfare. On May 10, the German attack on The Netherlands
began with the capture by parachutists of the bridges at Moerdijk, at Dordrecht,
and at
Rotterdam and with landings on the
airfields around The Hague. On the same day, the weakly held Peel Line, south of
the westward-turning arc of the Maas, was penetrated by the German land forces;
and on May 11 the Dutch defenders fell back westward past Tilburg to Breda, with
the consequence that the French 7th Army, under General Henri Giraud, whose
leading forces had sped forward across Belgium over the 140 miles to Tilburg,
fell back to Breda likewise. The German tanks thus had a clear road to Moerdijk,
and by noon on May 12 they were in the outskirts of Rotterdam. North of the
Maas, meanwhile, where the bulk of the Dutch defense was concentrated, the
Germans achieved a narrow breach of the Geld Valley line on May 12, whereupon
the Dutch, unable to counterattack, retreated to the "Fortress of Holland" Line
protecting Utrecht and Amsterdam. Queen Wilhelmina and her government left the
country for England on May 13; and the next day the Dutch commander in chief,
General Henri Gerard Winkelman, surrendered to the Germans, who had threatened
to bomb Rotterdam and Utrecht, as places in the front line of the fighting, if
resistance continued. In fact, Rotterdam was bombed, after the capitulation, by
30 planes through a mistake in the Germans' signal communications.

The news of the German
onslaught in the Low Countries, dismaying as it was to the Allies, had one
effect that was to be of momentous importance to their fortunes:
Chamberlain, whose halfhearted
conduct of the war had been bitterly criticized in the House of Commons during
the debate of May 7-8 on the campaign in Norway, resigned office in the evening
of May 10 and was succeeded as prime minister by Churchill, who formed a
coalition government.

For the first phase of the
invasion of the Belgian plain north of Ličge, Reichenau had four army corps, one
armoured corps, and only 500 airborne troops; but he also had massive
cooperation from the German Luftwaffe, whose dive bombers and fighters played a
major role in breaking down the Belgian defenses. West of the Maastricht
"appendix" of indefensible Dutch territory separating Belgium from Germany, the
fortress of
Eben Emael, immediately opposite
Maastricht, and the line of the Albert Canal constituted the Belgians' foremost
defensive position. On May 10 German airborne troops landed in gliders on the
top of the fortress and on bridges over the canal. On May 11 the Belgian front
was broken, the German tanks running on westward and some of the infantry
turning southward to take Ličge from the rear, while the Belgians made a general
retreat to the Antwerp-Namur, or Dyle, Line. French and British divisions had
just arrived on this Dyle Line, and General René Prioux's two tank divisions
went out from it to challenge the German advance. After a big battle on May 14,
however, Prioux's tanks had to retire to the consolidated Dyle Line; and on May
15, notwithstanding a successful defense against a German attack, Gamelin
ordered the abandonment of the position, because events farther to the south had
made it strategically untenable.

The chances for success of
the German offensive against France hinged on a German advance through the hilly
and dense
Ardennes Forest, which the French
considered to be impassable to tanks. But the Germans did succeed in moving
their tank columns through that difficult belt of country by means of an amazing
feat of staff work. While the armoured divisions used such roads through the
forest as were available, infantry divisions started alongside them by using
field and woodland paths and marched so fast across country that the leading
ones reached the Meuse River only a day after the armoured divisions had.

The decisive operations in
France were those of Rundstedt's Army Group A. Kleist's tanks on May 10 took
only three hours to cover the 30 miles from the eastern border of independent
Luxembourg to the southeastern border of Belgium; and on May 11 the French
cavalry divisions that had ridden forward into the Ardennes to oppose them were
thrown back over the Semois River. By the evening of May 12 the Germans were
across the Franco-Belgian frontier and overlooking the Meuse River. The defenses
of this sector were rudimentary, and it was the least-fortified stretch of the
whole French front. Worse still, the defending French 2nd and 9th armies had
hardly any antitank guns or antiaircraft artillery with which to slow down the
German armoured columns and shoot down their dive bombers. Such was the folly of
the French belief that a German armoured thrust through the Ardennes was
unlikely.

On May 13 Kleist's forces
achieved a threefold crossing of the Meuse River. At Sedan wave after wave of
German dive bombers swooped on the French defenders of the south bank. The
latter could not stand the nerve-racking strain, and the German troops were able
to push across the river in rubber boats and on rafts. The tremendous air
bombardment was the decisive factor in the crossings. A thousand aircraft
supported Kleist's forces, while only a few French aircraft intervened in a
gallant but hopeless effort to aid their troops on the ground. Next day, after
the tanks had been brought across, Guderian widened the Sedan bridgehead and
beat off French counterattacks. On May 15 he broke through the French defenses
into open country, turning westward in the direction of the English Channel. On
May 16 his forces swept on west for nearly 50 miles. His superiors tried to put
on the brake, feeling that such rapid progress was hazardous, but the pace of
the German drive upset the French far more, and their collapse spread as
Reinhardt's corps joined in the pressure. When more German tanks crossed the
Meuse between Givet and Namur, the breach of the French front was 60 miles wide.

Driving westward down the
empty corridor between the Sambre and the Aisne rivers, Guderian's tanks crossed
the Oise River on May 17 and reached Amiens two days later. Giraud, who on May
15 had superseded Corap in command of the French 9th Army, was thus frustrated
in his desperate plan of checking the Germans on the Oise; and Kleist,
meanwhile, by lining the Aisne progressively with tanks until the infantry came
up to relieve them, was protecting the southwestern flank of the advance against
the danger of a counteroffensive from the south. Indeed, when the Germans, on
May 15, were reported to be crossing the Aisne River between Rethel and Laon,
Gamelin told Reynaud that he had no reserves in that sector and that Paris might
fall within two days' time. Thereupon Reynaud, though he postponed his immediate
decision to move the government to Tours, summoned General
Maxime Weygand from Syria to take
Gamelin's place as commander in chief; but Weygand did not arrive until May 19.

Guderian's tanks were at
Abbeville on May 20, and on May 22 he turned northward to threaten Calais and
Dunkirk, while Reinhardt, swinging south of the British rear at Arras, headed
for the same objectives, the remaining ports by which the
British Expeditionary Force (BEF)
could be evacuated.

The evacuation from Dunkirk

For the Allies, all
communication between their northern and southern forces was severed by the arc
of the westward German advance from the Ardennes to the
Somme. The Allied armies in the
north, having fallen back from the Dyle Line to the Escaut (Schelde), were being
encircled, and already on May 19 the British commander, Viscount Gort, was
considering the withdrawal of the BEF by sea. On May 21, however, to satisfy
orders from London for more positive action, he launched an attack from Arras
southward against the right flank of the Germans' corridor; but, though it
momentarily alarmed the German high command, this small counterstroke lacked the
armoured strength necessary for success. Meanwhile, Guderian's tanks had swept
up past Boulogne and Calais and were crossing the canal defense line close to
Dunkirk when, on May 24, an
inexplicable order from Hitler not only stopped their advance but actually
called them back to the canal line just as Guderian was expecting to drive into
Dunkirk.

Dunkirk was now the only
port left available for the withdrawal of the mass of the BEF from Europe, and
the British Cabinet at last decided to save what could be saved. The British
Admiralty had been collecting every kind of small craft it could find to help in
removing the troops, and the British retreat to the coast now became a race to
evacuate the troops before the Germans could occupy Dunkirk. Evacuation began on
May 26 and became still more urgent the next day, when the Belgians, their right
wing and their centre broken by Reichenau's advance, sued for an armistice. On
May 27, likewise, bombing by the Luftwaffe put the harbour of Dunkirk out of
use, so that many of the thousands of men thronging the 10-mile stretch of
beaches had to be ferried out to sea by petty craft pressed into service by the
Royal Navy and manned largely by amateur seamen, though the harbour's damaged
breakwater still offered a practicable exit for the majority. By June 4, when
the operation came to an end, 198,000 British and 140,000 French and Belgian
troops had been saved; but virtually all of their heavy equipment had to be
abandoned, and, of the 41 destroyers participating, six were sunk and 19 others
damaged. The men who were saved represented a considerable part of the
experienced troops possessed by Great Britain and were an inestimable gain to
the Allies. The success of the near-miraculous evacuation from Dunkirk was due,
on the one hand, to fighter cover by the Royal Air Force from the English coast
and on the other to Hitler's fatal order of May 24 halting Guderian. That order
had been made for several reasons, chiefly:
Hermann Göring, head of the
Luftwaffe, had mistakenly assured Hitler that his aircraft alone could destroy
the Allied troops trapped on the beaches at Dunkirk; and Hitler himself seems to
have believed that Great Britain might accept peace terms more readily if its
armies were not constrained into humiliating surrender. Three days passed before
Brauchitsch, the German Army commander in chief, was able to persuade Hitler to
withdraw his orders and allow the German armoured forces to advance on Dunkirk.
But they met stronger opposition from the British, who had had time to solidify
their defenses, and almost immediately Hitler stopped the German armoured forces
again, ordering them instead to move south and prepare for the attack on the
Somme-Aisne line.

The campaign in northern
France was wound up by Küchler's forces, after both Guderian and Reichenau had
been ordered southward. Altogether, the Germans had taken more than 1,000,000
prisoners in three weeks, at a cost of 60,000 casualties. Some 220,000 Allied
troops, however, were rescued by British ships from France's northwestern ports
(Cherbourg, Saint-Malo, Brest, and Saint-Nazaire), thus bringing the total of
Allied troops evacuated to about 558,000.

There remained the
French armies south of the Germans'
Somme-Aisne front. The French had lost 30 divisions in the campaign so far.
Weygand still managed to muster 49 divisions, apart from the 17 left to hold the
Maginot Line, but against him the Germans had 130 infantry divisions as well as
their 10 divisions of tanks. The Germans, after redisposing their units, began a
new offensive on June 5 from their positions on the Somme. The French resisted
stiffly for two days, but on June 7 the German tanks in the westernmost sector,
led by Major General
Erwin Rommel, broke through toward
Rouen, and on June 9 they were over the Seine. On June 9 the Germans attacked on
the Aisne: the infantry forced the crossings, and then
Guderian's armour drove through the
breach toward Châlons-sur-Marne before turning eastward for the Swiss frontier,
thus isolating all the French forces still holding the Maginot Line.

Italy's entry into the war and the French Armistice

Italy had been unprepared for war
when Hitler attacked Poland, but if the Italian leader, Benito Mussolini, was to
reap any positive advantages from partnership with Hitler it seemed that Italy
would have to abandon its nonbelligerent stance before the western democracies
had been defeated by Germany single handed. The obvious collapse of France
convinced Mussolini that the time to implement his Pact of Steel with Hitler had
come, and on June 10, 1940, Italy declared war against France and Great Britain.
With about 30 divisions available on their Alpine frontier, the Italians delayed
their actual attack on southeastern France until June 20, but it achieved little
against the local defense. In any case, the issue in France had already been
virtually settled by the victory of Italy's German ally.

Meanwhile, Reynaud had
left Paris for Cangé, near Tours; and Weygand, after speaking frankly and
despondently to Churchill at the Allied military headquarters at Briare on June
11, told Reynaud and the other ministers at Cangé on June 12 that the battle for
France was lost and that a cessation of hostilities was compulsory. There was
little doubt that he was correct in this estimate of the military situation: the
French armies were now splitting up into fragments. Reynaud's government was
divided between the advocates of capitulation and those who, with Reynaud,
wanted to continue the war from French North Africa. The only decision that it
could make was to move itself from Tours to Bordeaux.

The Germans entered Paris
on June 14, 1940, and were driving still deeper southward along both the western
and eastern edges of France. Two days later they were in the Rhône Valley.
Meanwhile, Weygand was still pressing for an armistice, backed by all the
principal commanders. Reynaud resigned office on June 16, whereupon a new
government was formed by Marshal
Philippe Pétain, the revered and aged
hero of the Battle of Verdun in World War I. In the night of June 16 the French
request for an armistice was transmitted to Hitler. While discussion of the
terms went on, the German advance went on too. Finally, on June 22, 1940, at
Rethondes, the scene of the signing
of the Armistice of 1918, the new
Franco-German Armistice was signed.
The Franco-Italian Armistice was signed on June 24. Both armistices came into
effect early on June 25.

The Armistice of June 22
divided France into two zones, one to be under German military occupation, one
to be left to the French in full sovereignty. The
occupied zone comprised all northern
France from the northwestern frontier of Switzerland to the Channel and from the
Belgian and German frontiers to the Atlantic, together with a strip extending
from the lower Loire southward along the Atlantic coast to the western end of
the Pyrenees; the unoccupied zone comprised only two-fifths of France's
territory, the southeast. The French Navy and Air Force were to be neutralized,
but it was not required that they be handed over to the Germans. The Italians
granted very generous terms to the French: the only French territory that they
claimed to occupy was the small frontier tract that their forces had succeeded
in overrunning since June 20. Meanwhile, from June 18, General
Charles de Gaulle, whom
Reynaud had sent on a military
mission to London on June 5, was broadcasting appeals for the continuance of
France's war.

The collapse of France in
June 1940 posed a severe naval problem to the British, because the powerful
French Navy still existed: strategically, it was of immense importance to the
British that these French ships not fall into German hands, since they would
have tilted the balance of sea power decidedly in favour of the Axis--the
Italian Navy being now also at war with Britain. Mistrustful of promises that
the French ships would be used only for "supervision and
minesweeping," the British decided to
immobilize them. Thus, on July 3, 1940, the British seized all French ships in
British-controlled ports, encountering only nominal resistance. But when British
ships appeared off Mers el-Kébir, near Oran on the Algerian coast, and demanded
that the ships of the important French naval force there either join the Allies
or sail out to sea, the French refused to submit, and the British eventually
opened fire, damaging the battleship Dunkerque, destroying the
Bretagne, and disabling several other vessels. Thereupon, Pétain's
government, which on July 1 had installed itself at Vichy, on July 4 severed
diplomatic relations with the British. In the eight following days, the
constitution of France's Third Republic was abolished and a new
French state created, under the
supreme authority of Pétain himself. The few French colonies that rallied to
General de Gaulle's
Free French movement were
strategically unimportant.

With France conquered,
Hitler could now turn his forces on Germany's sole remaining enemy: Great
Britain, which was protected from the formidable German Army by the waters of
the
English Channel. On July 16, 1940,
Hitler issued a directive ordering the preparation and, if necessary, the
execution of a plan for the invasion of Great Britain. But an amphibious
invasion of Britain would only be possible, given Britain's large navy, if
Germany could establish control of the air in the battle zone. To this end, the
Luftwaffe chief, Göring, on August 2 issued the "Eagle Day" directive, laying
down a plan of attack in which a few massive blows from the air were to destroy
British air power and so open the way for the amphibious invasion, termed
Operation
"Sea Lion." Victory in the air battle
for the Luftwaffe would indeed have exposed Great Britain to invasion and
occupation. The victory by the
Royal Air Force (RAF) Fighter Command
blocked this possibility and, in fact, created the conditions for Great
Britain's survival, for the extension of the war, and for the eventual defeat of
Nazi Germany.

The forces engaged in the
battle were relatively small. The British disposed some 600 frontline fighters
to defend the country. The Germans made available about 1,300 bombers and dive
bombers, and about 900 single-engined and 300 twin-engined fighters. These were
based in an arc around England from Norway to the Cherbourg Peninsula in
northern coastal France. The preliminaries of the Battle of Britain occupied
June and July 1940, the climax August and September, and the aftermath--the
so-called
Blitz--the winter of 1940-41. In the
campaign, the Luftwaffe had no systematic or consistent plan of action:
sometimes it tried to establish a blockade by the destruction of British
shipping and ports; sometimes, to destroy Britain's Fighter Command by combat
and by the bombing of ground installations; and sometimes, to seek direct
strategic results by attacks on London and other populous centres of industrial
or political significance. The British, on the other hand, had prepared
themselves for the kind of battle that in fact took place. Their radar early
warning, the most advanced and the most operationally adapted system in the
world, gave Fighter Command adequate notice of where and when to direct their
fighter forces to repel German bombing raids. The
Spitfire, moreover, though still in
short supply, was unsurpassed as an interceptor by any fighter in any other air
force.

The British fought not
only with the advantage--unusual for them--of superior equipment and undivided
aim but also against an enemy divided in object and condemned by circumstance
and by lack of forethought to fight at a tactical disadvantage. The German
bombers lacked the bomb-load capacity to strike permanently devastating blows
and also proved, in daylight, to be easily vulnerable to the Spitfires and
Hurricanes. Britain's radar,
moreover, largely prevented them from exploiting the element of surprise. The
German dive bombers were even more vulnerable to being shot down by British
fighters, and long-range fighter cover was only partially available from German
fighter aircraft, since the latter were operating at the limit of their flying
range.

The German air attacks
began on ports and airfields along the English Channel, where convoys were
bombed and the air battle was joined. In June and July 1940, as the Germans
gradually redeployed their forces, the air battle moved inland over the interior
of Britain. On August 8 the intensive phase began, when the Germans launched
bombing raids involving up to nearly 1,500 aircraft a day and directed them
against the British fighter airfields and radar stations. In four actions, on
August 8, 11, 12, and 13, the Germans lost 145 aircraft as against the British
loss of 88. By late August the Germans had lost more than 600 aircraft, the RAF
only 260, but the RAF was losing badly needed fighters and experienced pilots at
too great a rate, and its effectiveness was further hampered by bombing damage
done to the radar stations. At the beginning of September the British retaliated
by unexpectedly launching a bombing raid on Berlin, which so infuriated Hitler
that he ordered the Luftwaffe to shift its attacks from Fighter Command
installations to
London and other cities. (For
contemporary descriptions of the devastation of London, see
BTW: London Classics: London in World War II.)
These assaults on London,
Coventry,
Liverpool, and other cities went on
unabated for several months. But already, by September 15, on which day the
British believed, albeit incorrectly, that they had scored their greatest
success by destroying 185 German aircraft, Fighter Command had demonstrated to
the Luftwaffe that it could not gain air ascendancy over Britain. This was
because British fighters were simply shooting down German bombers faster than
German industry could produce them. The Battle of Britain was thus won, and the
invasion of England was postponed indefinitely by Hitler. The British had lost
more than 900 fighters but had shot down about 1,700 German aircraft.

During the following
winter, the Luftwaffe maintained a bombing offensive, carrying out night-bombing
attacks on Britain's larger cities. By February 1941 the offensive had declined,
but in March and April there was a revival, and nearly 10,000 sorties were
flown, with heavy attacks made on London. Thereafter German strategic air
operations over England withered.

World War
II: Axis and Allied
movements in Europe and North Africa, 1940-42, and (inset) German invasion of
the...

The continued
resistance of the British caused Hitler once more to change his timetable. His
great design for a campaign against the
U.S.S.R. had originally been scheduled
to begin about 1943--by which time he should have secured the German position on
the rest of the European continent by a series of "localized" campaigns and have
reached some sort of compromise with Great Britain. But in July 1940, seeing
Great Britain still undefeated and the United States increasingly inimical to
Germany, he decided that the conquest of the European part of the Soviet Union
must be undertaken in May 1941, in order both to demonstrate Germany's
invincibility to Great Britain and to deter the United States from intervention
in Europe (because the elimination of the U.S.S.R. would strengthen the Japanese
position in the Far East and in the Pacific). Events in the interval, however,
were to make him change his plan once again.

While the invasion of the
U.S.S.R. was being prepared, Hitler was much concerned to extend German
influence across Slovakia and Hungary into
Romania, the oil fields of which he
was anxious to secure against Soviet attack and the military manpower of which
might be joined to the forces of the German coalition. In May 1940 he obtained
an oil and arms pact from Romania; but, when Romania, after being constrained by
a Soviet ultimatum in June to cede Bessarabia and northern Bukovina to the
U.S.S.R., requested a German military mission and a German guarantee of its
remaining frontiers, Hitler refused to comply until the claims of other states
against Romania had been met. Romania was compelled to cede southern Dobruja to
Bulgaria on August 21 (an act that was formalized in the
Treaty of Craiova on September 7);
but its negotiations with
Hungary about
Transylvania were broken off on
August 23. Since, if war had broken out between Romania and Hungary, the
U.S.S.R. might have intervened and won control over the oil wells, Hitler
decided to arbitrate immediately: by the
Vienna Award of August 30, Germany
and Italy assigned northern Transylvania, including the Szekler district, to
Hungary, and Germany then guaranteed what was left of Romania. In the face of
the Romanian nationalists' outcry against these proceedings, the king,
Carol II, transferred his dictatorial
powers to General
Ion Antonescu on Sept. 4, 1940, and
abdicated his crown in favour of his young son Michael two days later. Antonescu
had already repeated the request for a German military mission, which arrived in
Bucharest on October 12.

Though Hitler had apprised
the Italian foreign minister,
Galeazzo Ciano, of his intention to
send a military mission to Romania, Ciano had not apprised Mussolini. So, since
the latter's Balkan ambitions had been continually restrained by Hitler,
particularly with regard to Yugoslavia, the sudden news of the mission annoyed
him. On Oct. 28, 1940, therefore, having given Hitler only the barest hints of
his project, Mussolini launched seven Italian divisions (155,000 men) from
Albania into a separate war of his
own against
Greece.

The result was
exasperating for Hitler. His ally's forces were not only halted by the Greeks, a
few miles over the border, on Nov. 8, 1940, but were also driven back by General
Alexandros Papagos' counteroffensive
of November 14, which was to put the Greeks in possession of one-third of
Albania by mid-December. Moreover, British troops landed in Crete, and some
British aircraft were sent to bases near Athens, whence they might have attacked
the Romanian oil fields. Lastly, the success of the Greeks caused
Yugoslavia and
Bulgaria, who had hitherto been
attentive to overtures from the Axis powers, to revert to a strictly neutral
policy.

Anticipating Mussolini's
appeal for German help in his "separate" or "parallel" war, Hitler in November
1940 drew Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia successively into the
Axis, or
Tripartite, Pact that Germany, Italy,
and Japan had concluded on September 27 (see below
Japanese policy, 1939-41); and he
also obtained Romania's assent to the assembling of German troops in the south
of Romania for an attack on Greece through Bulgaria. Hungary consented to the
transit of these troops through its territory lest Romania take Hungary's place
in Germany's favour and so be secured in possession of the Transylvanian lands
left to it by the Vienna Award. Bulgaria, however, for fear of Soviet reaction,
on the one hand, and of Turkish, on the other (Turkey had massed 28 divisions in
Thrace when Italy attacked Greece), delayed its adhesion to the Axis until March
1, 1941. Only thereafter, on March 18, did the Yugoslav regent, Prince Paul, and
his ministers Dragisa Cvetkovic and Aleksandar Cincar-Markovic
agree to Yugoslavia's adhesion to the Axis.

Meanwhile, the German 12th
Army had crossed the Danube from Romania into Bulgaria on March 2, 1941.
Consequently, in accordance with a Greco-British agreement of February 21, a
British expeditionary force of 58,000 men from Egypt landed in Greece on March
7, to occupy the Olympus-Vermion line. Then, on March 27, 1941, two days after
the Yugoslav government's signature, in Vienna, of its adhesion to the Axis
Pact, a group of Yugoslav Army officers, led by General
Dusan
Simovic, executed a
coup d'état in
Belgrade, overthrowing the regency in
favour of the 17-year-old king Peter II and reversing the former government's
policy.

Almost simultaneously with
the Belgrade coup d'état, the decisive Battle of Cape Matapan took place between
the British and Italian fleets in the Mediterranean, off the Peloponnesian
mainland northwest of Crete. Hitherto, Italo-British naval hostilities in the
Mediterranean area since June 1940 had comprised only one noteworthy action: the
sinking in November at the Italian naval base of
Taranto of three battleships by
aircraft from the British carrier Illustrious. In March 1941, however,
some Italian naval forces, including the battleship Vittorio Veneto, with
several cruisers and destroyers, set out to threaten British convoys to Greece;
and British forces, including the battleships Warspite, Valiant, and Barham
and the aircraft carrier Formidable, likewise with cruisers and
destroyers, were sent to intercept them. When the forces met in the morning of
March 28, off Cape Matapan, the Vittorio Veneto opened fire on the
lighter British ships but was soon trying to escape from the engagement, for
fear of the torpedo aircraft from the Formidable. The battle then became
a pursuit, which lasted long into the night. Finally, though the severely
damaged Vittorio Veneto made good her escape, the British sank three
Italian cruisers and two destroyers. The Italian Navy made no more surface
ventures into the eastern Mediterranean.

The German attack on
Greece, scheduled for April 1, 1941, was postponed for a few days when Hitler,
because of the Belgrade coup d'état, decided that Yugoslavia was to be destroyed
at the same time. While Great Britain's efforts to draw Yugoslavia into the
Greco-British defensive system were fruitless, Germany began canvasing allies
for its planned invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece. Italy agreed to collaborate
in the attack, and Hungary and Bulgaria agreed to send troops to occupy the
territories that they coveted as soon as the Germans should have destroyed the
Yugoslav state.

On April 6, 1941, the
Germans, with 24 divisions and 1,200 tanks, invaded both Yugoslavia (which had
32 divisions) and Greece (which had 15 divisions). The operations were conducted
in the same way as Germany's previous blitzkrieg campaigns. While massive air
raids struck Belgrade,
List's 12th Army drove westward and
southward from the Bulgarian frontiers, Kleist's armoured group northwestward
from Sofia, and Weichs's 2nd Army southward from Austria and from western
Hungary. The 12th Army's advance through Skopje to the Albanian border cut
communications between Yugoslavia and Greece in two days; Nis fell to
Kleist on April 9, Zagreb to Weichs on April 10; and on April 11 the Italian 2nd
Army (comprising 15 divisions) advanced from Istria into Dalmatia. After the
fall of Belgrade to the German forces from bases in Romania (April 12), the
remnant of the Yugoslav Army--whose only offensive, in northern Albania, had
collapsed--was encircled in Bosnia. Its capitulation was signed, in Belgrade, on
April17.

In Greece, meanwhile, the
Germans took Salonika (Thessaloníki) on April 9, 1941, and then initiated a
drive toward Ioánnina (Yannina), thus severing communication between the bulk of
the Greek Army (which was on the Albanian frontier) and its rear. The isolated
main body capitulated on April 20, the Greek Army as a whole on April 22. Two
days later the pass of Thermopylae, defended by a British rear guard, was taken
by the Germans, who entered Athens on April 27. All mainland Greece and all the
Greek Aegean islands except
Crete were under German occupation by
May 11, the Ionian islands under Italian. The remainder of Britain's 50,000-man
force in Greece was hastily evacuated with great difficulty after leaving all of
their tanks and other heavy equipment behind.

The campaign against
Yugoslavia brought 340,000 soldiers of the Yugoslav Army into captivity as
German prisoners of war. In the campaign against Greece the Germans took 220,000
Greek and 20,000 British or Commonwealth prisoners of war. The combined German
losses in the Balkan campaigns were about 2,500 dead, 6,000 wounded, and 3,000
missing.

German airborne troops
began to land in Crete on May 20, 1941, at Máleme, in the Canea-Suda area, at
Réthimnon, and at Iráklion. Fighting, on land and on the sea, with heavy losses
on both sides, went on for a week before the Allied commander in chief, General
Bernard Cyril Freyberg of the New
Zealand Expeditionary Force, was authorized to evacuate the island. The last
defenders were overwhelmed at Réthimnon on May 31. The prisoners of war taken by
the Germans in Crete numbered more than 15,000 British or Commonwealth troops,
besides the Greeks taken. In battles around the island, German air attacks sank
three light cruisers and six destroyers of the British Mediterranean fleet and
damaged three battleships, one aircraft carrier, six light cruisers, and five
destroyers.

Both the Yugoslav and the
Greek royal governments went into exile on their armies' collapse. The Axis
powers were left to dispose as they would of their conquests. Yugoslavia was
completely dissolved:
Croatia, the independence of which
had been proclaimed on April 10, 1941, was expanded to form Great Croatia, which
included Srem (Syrmia, the zone between the Sava and the Danube south of the
Drava confluence) and Bosnia and Hercegovina; most of Dalmatia was annexed to
Italy; Montenegro was restored to independence; Yugoslav Macedonia was
partitioned between Bulgaria and Albania; Slovenia was partitioned between Italy
and Germany; the Baranya triangle and the Backa went to Hungary; the
Banat and Serbia were put under German military administration. Of the
independent states, Great Croatia, ruled by Ante Pavelic's nationalist
Ustase
("Insurgents"), and Montenegro were Italian spheres of influence, although
German troops still occupied the eastern part of Great Croatia. A puppet
government of Serbia was set up by the Germans in August 1941.

While Bulgarian troops
occupied eastern
Macedonia and most of western
Thrace, the rest of mainland Greece,
theoretically subject to a puppet government in Athens, was militarily occupied
by the Italians except for three zones, namely the Athens district, the Salonika
district, and the Dimotika strip of Thrace, which the German conquerors reserved
for themselves. The Germans also remained in occupation of Lesbos, Chios, Samos,
Melos, and Crete.

Other fronts, 1940-41

Egypt and Cyrenaica, 1940-summer 1941

The contemporary course of
events in the Balkans, described above, nullified the first great victory won by
British land forces in World War II, which took place in North Africa. When
Italy declared war against Great Britain in June 1940, it had nearly 300,000 men
under Marshal
Rodolfo Graziani in
Cyrenaica (present-day Libya), to
confront the 36,000 troops whom the British commander in chief in the Middle
East, General
Sir Archibald Wavell, had in
Egypt to protect the North African
approaches to the Suez Canal. Between these forces lay the Western Desert, in
which the westernmost position actually held by the British was Mersa Matruh (Marsa
MatIuh), 120 miles east
of the Cyrenaican frontier. The Italians in September 1940 occupied Sidi Barrani,
170 miles west of Mersa Matruh; but, after settling six divisions into a chain
of widely separated camps, they did nothing more for weeks, and during that time
Wavell received some reinforcements.

Wavell, whose command
included not only Egypt but also the East African fronts against the Italians,
decided to strike first in
North Africa. On Dec. 7, 1940, some
30,000 men, under Major General Richard Nugent O'Connor, advanced westward, from
Mersa Matruh, against 80,000 Italians; but, whereas the Italians at Sidi Barrani
had only 120 tanks, O'Connor had 275. Having passed by night through a gap in
the chain of forts, O'Connor's forces stormed three of the Italian camps, while
the 7th Armoured Division was already cutting the Italians' road of retreat
along the coast to the west. On December 10 most of the positions closer to Sidi
Barrani were overrun; and on December 11 the reserve tanks made a further
enveloping bound to the coast beyond Buqbuq, intercepting a large column of
retreating Italians. In three days the British had taken nearly 40,000
prisoners.

Falling back across the
frontier into Cyrenaica, the remnant of the Italian forces from Sidi Barrani
shut itself up in the fortress of Bardia (Bardiyah), which O'Connor's tanks
speedily isolated. On Jan. 3, 1941, the British assault on Bardia began, and
three days later the whole garrison of Bardia surrendered--45,000 men. The next
fortress to the west, Tobruk (Tubruq), was assaulted on January 23 and
captured the next day (30,000 more prisoners).

To complete their conquest
of Cyrenaica, it remained for the British to take the port of Benghazi. On Feb.
3, 1941, however, O'Connor learned that the Italians were about to abandon
Benghazi and to retreat westward down the coast road to Agheila (al-'Uqaylah).
Thereupon he boldly ordered the 7th Armoured Division to cross the desert
hinterland and intercept the Italian retreat by cutting the coast road well to
the east of Agheila. On February 5, after an advance of 170 miles in 33 hours,
the British were blocking the Italians' line of retreat south of Beda Fomm (Bayda'
Fumm); and in the morning of February 6, as the main Italian columns appeared, a
day of battle began. Though the Italians had, altogether, nearly four times as
many cruiser tanks as the British, by the following morning 60 Italian tanks had
been crippled, 40 more abandoned, and the rest of Graziani's army was
surrendering in crowds. The British, only 3,000 strong and having lost only
three of their 29 tanks, took 20,000 prisoners, 120 tanks, and 216 guns.

The British, having
occupied Benghazi on February 6 and Agheila on February 8, could now have pushed
on without hindrance to Tripoli, but the chance was foregone: the Greek
government had accepted Churchill's reiterated offer of British troops to be
sent to Greece from Egypt, which meant a serious reduction of British strength
in North Africa.

The reduction was to have
serious consequences, because on February 6, the very day of Beda Fomm, a young
general, Erwin Rommel, had been appointed by Hitler to command two German
mechanized divisions that were to be sent as soon as possible to help the
Italians. Arriving in Tripolitania, Rommel decided to try an offensive with what
forces he had. Against the depleted British strength, he was rapidly and
brilliantly successful. After occupying Agheila with ease on March 24 and Mersa
Bréga (Qasr al-Burayqah) on March 31, he resumed his advance on April 2--despite
orders to stand still for two months--with 50 tanks backed by two new Italian
divisions. The British evacuated Benghazi the next day and began a precipitate
retreat into Egypt, losing great numbers of their tanks on the way (a large
force of armour, surrounded at Mechili, had to surrender on April 7). By April
11 all Cyrenaica except
Tobruk had been reconquered by
Rommel's audacious initiative.

Tobruk, garrisoned mainly
by the 9th Australian Division, held out against siege; and Rommel, though he
defeated two British attempts to relieve the place (May and June 1941), was
obliged to suspend his offensive on the Egyptian frontier, since he had
overstretched his supply lines.

Wavell, the success of
whose North African strategy had been sacrificed to Churchill's recurrent
fantasy of creating a Balkan front against Germany (Greece in 1941 was scarcely
less disastrous for the British than the Dardanelles in 1915), nevertheless
enjoyed one definitive triumph before Churchill, doubly chagrined at having lost
Cyrenaica for Greece's sake and Greece for no advantage at all, removed him, in
the summer of 1941, from his command in the Middle East. That triumph was the
destruction of Italian East Africa and the elimination, thereby, of any threat
to the Suez Canal from the south or to Kenya from the north.

In August 1940 Italian
forces mounted a full-scale offensive and overran British
Somaliland. Wavell, however, was
already assured of the collaboration of the former
Ethiopian emperor
Haile Selassie in raising the
Ethiopians in patriotic revolt against the Italians; and, whereas in June he had
disposed only of meagre resources against the 200,000 men and 325 aircraft under
the Duca d'Aosta, Amedeo di Savoia, his troops in the Sudan were reinforced by
two Indian divisions before the end of the year. After Haile Selassie and a
British major, Orde Wingate, with two battalions of Ethiopian exiles, had
crossed the Sudanese frontier directly into Ethiopia, General William Platt and
the Indian divisions invaded Eritrea on Jan. 19, 1941 (the Italians had already
abandoned Kassala); and, almost simultaneously, British troops from Kenya, under
General Alan Cunningham, advanced into Italian Somaliland.

Platt's drive eastward
into Eritrea was checked on February 5, at Keren, where the best Italian troops,
under General Nicolangelo Carnimeo, put up a stiff defense facilitated by a
barrier of cliffs. But when Keren fell on March 26, Platt's way to Asmara (Asmera),
to Massawa (Mitsiwa), and then from Eritrea southward into Ethiopia was
comparatively easy. Meanwhile, Cunningham's troops were advancing northward into
Ethiopia; and on April 6 they entered the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.
Finally, the Duca d'Aosta was caught between Platt's column and Cunningham's;
and at Amba Alaji, on May 20, he and the main body of his forces surrendered.

Iraq and Syria, 1940-41

In 1940 Prince
'Abd al-Ilah, regent of
Iraq for King Faysal, had a
government divided within itself about the war; he himself and his foreign
minister,
Nuri as-Said, were pro-British, but
his prime minister,
Rashid Ali al-Gailani, had pro-German
leanings. Having resigned office in January 1941, Rashid Ali on April 3 seized
power in Baghdad with help from some army officers and announced that the
temporarily absent regent was deposed. The British, ostensibly exercising their
right under the
Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1930 to move
troops across Iraqi territory, landed troops at Basra on April 19 and rejected
Iraqi demands that these troops be sent on into
Palestine before any further
landings. Iraqi troops were then concentrated around the British air base at
Habbaniyah,
west of
Baghdad; and on May 2 the British
commander there opened hostilities, lest the Iraqis should attack first. Having
won the upper hand at Habbaniyah and been reinforced from Palestine, the
British troops from the air base marched on Baghdad; and on May 30 Rashid Ali
and his friends took refuge in Iran. 'Abd al-Ilah was reinstated as regent; Nuri
became prime minister; and the British military presence remained to uphold
them.

German military supplies
for Rashid Ali were dispatched too late to be useful to him; but they reached
Iraq via
Syria, whose high commissioner,
General H.-F. Dentz, was a nominee of the Vichy government of France. Lest Syria
and Lebanon should fall altogether under Axis control, the British decided to
intervene there. Consequently,
Free French forces, under General
Georges Catroux, with British, Australian, and Indian support, were sent into
both countries from Palestine on June 8, 1941; and a week later British forces
invaded Syria from Iraq. Dentz's forces put up an unexpectedly stiff resistance,
particularly against the Free French, but were finally obliged to capitulate: an
armistice was signed at Acre on July 14. By an arrangement of July 25 the Free
French retained territorial command in Syria and Lebanon subject to strategic
control by the British.

Iraq and Syria, 1940-41

In 1940 Prince
'Abd al-Ilah, regent of
Iraq for King Faysal, had a
government divided within itself about the war; he himself and his foreign
minister,
Nuri as-Said, were pro-British, but
his prime minister,
Rashid Ali al-Gailani, had pro-German
leanings. Having resigned office in January 1941, Rashid Ali on April 3 seized
power in Baghdad with help from some army officers and announced that the
temporarily absent regent was deposed. The British, ostensibly exercising their
right under the
Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1930 to move
troops across Iraqi territory, landed troops at Basra on April 19 and rejected
Iraqi demands that these troops be sent on into
Palestine before any further
landings. Iraqi troops were then concentrated around the British air base at
Habbaniyah,
west of
Baghdad; and on May 2 the British
commander there opened hostilities, lest the Iraqis should attack first. Having
won the upper hand at Habbaniyah and been reinforced from Palestine, the
British troops from the air base marched on Baghdad; and on May 30 Rashid Ali
and his friends took refuge in Iran. 'Abd al-Ilah was reinstated as regent; Nuri
became prime minister; and the British military presence remained to uphold
them.

German military supplies
for Rashid Ali were dispatched too late to be useful to him; but they reached
Iraq via
Syria, whose high commissioner,
General H.-F. Dentz, was a nominee of the Vichy government of France. Lest Syria
and Lebanon should fall altogether under Axis control, the British decided to
intervene there. Consequently,
Free French forces, under General
Georges Catroux, with British, Australian, and Indian support, were sent into
both countries from Palestine on June 8, 1941; and a week later British forces
invaded Syria from Iraq. Dentz's forces put up an unexpectedly stiff resistance,
particularly against the Free French, but were finally obliged to capitulate: an
armistice was signed at Acre on July 14. By an arrangement of July 25 the Free
French retained territorial command in Syria and Lebanon subject to strategic
control by the British.

The Atlantic and the Mediterranean, 1940-41

At the outbreak of World
War II, the primary concerns of the British Navy were to defend Great Britain
from invasion and to retain command of the ocean trading routes, both in order
to protect the passage of essential supplies of food and raw materials for
Britain and to deny the trading routes to the Axis powers, thus drawing tight
once again the blockade that had proved so successful during World War I.
Britain had adequate forces of battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, and
other ships to fulfill these tasks.

The German Navy's role was
to protect Germany's coasts, to defend its sea communications and to attack
those of the Allies', and to support land and air operations. These modest goals
were in keeping with Germany's position as the dominant land-based power in
continental Europe. Germany's main naval weapon during the war was to be the
submarine, or
U-boat, with which it attacked Allied
shipping much as it had in World War I.

German control of the
Biscay ports after the fall of France in June 1940 provided the U-boats with
bases from which they could infest the Atlantic without having to pass either
through the Channel or around the north of the British Isles at the end of every
sortie. Thenceforward, so long as naval escorts for outgoing convoys from the
British Isles could go only 200 or 300 miles out to sea before having to turn
back to escort incoming convoys, the U-boats had a very wide field for
free-ranging activity: sinkings rose sharply from 55,580 tons in May 1940 to
352,407 tons in October, achieved mainly by solitary attacks by single U-boats
at night. But the beginning of lend-lease and the freeing of British warships
after the German invasion threat waned enabled the British to escort their
convoys for 400 miles by October 1940 and halfway across the Atlantic by April
1941. Since air cover for shipping could also be provided from the British
Isles, from Canada, and from Iceland, the Atlantic space left open to the
U-boats was reduced by May 1941 to a width of only 300 miles. Moreover, British
surface vessels had the ASDIC (Anti-Submarine
Detection Investigation Committee) device to detect submerged
U-boats. By the spring of 1941, under the guidance of Admiral
Karl Dönitz, the U-boat commanders
were changing their tactic of individual operation to one of
wolf-pack attacks: groups of U-boats,
disposed in long lines, would rally when one of them by radio signaled a
sighting and overwhelm the convoy by weight of numbers. Between July and
December 1941 the German U-boat strength was raised from 65 to more than 230.

Furthermore, the German
surface fleet became more active against Allied seaborne trade. Six armed German
raiders disguised as merchantmen, with orders to leave convoys alone and to
confine their attacks to unescorted ships, roamed the oceans with practical
impunity from the spring of 1940 and had sunk 366,644 tons of shipping by the
end of the year. German battleships--the Admiral Scheer, the Admiral
Hipper, the Scharnhorst, and the Gneisenau--one after another
began similar raiding operations, with considerable success, from October 1940;
and in May 1941 a really modern battleship, the Bismarck, and a new cruiser, the
Prinz Eugen, put out to sea from Germany. The Bismarck and the
Prinz Eugen, however, were located by British reconnaissance in the North
Sea near Bergen, and an intensive hunt for them was immediately set in motion.
Tracked from a point northwest of Iceland by two British cruisers, the two
German ships were engaged on May 24 by the battle cruiser Hood and by the
new battleship Prince of Wales; and, though the
Hood was sunk, the Bismarck 's fuel supply was put out of action,
so that her commander, Admiral Günther Lütjens, decided to make for the French
coast. Separating from the Prinz Eugen (which escaped), the Bismarck
threw off her pursuers early on May 25 but was sighted again the next day some
660 miles west of Brest. Paralyzed by torpedo aircraft from the Ark Royal,
she was bombarded and sunk by the King George V, the Rodney, and
the Dorsetshire on May 27.

In the Mediterranean the
year 1941 ended with some naval triumphs for the Axis: U-boats torpedoed the
Ark Royal on November 13 and the Barham 12 days later; Italian
frogmen, entering the harbour of Alexandria, on December 19 crippled the
battleships Queen Elizabeth and Valiant; and two British cruisers
and a destroyer were also sunk in Mediterranean waters in December.

German strategy, 1939-42

German strategy in World
War II is wholly intelligible only if Hitler's far-reaching system of power
politics and his racist ideology are borne in mind. Since the 1920s his program
had been first to win power in Germany proper, next to consolidate Germany's
domination over Central Europe, and then to raise Germany to the status of a
world power by two stages: (1) the building up of a continental empire embracing
all Europe, including the European portion of the Soviet Union, and (2) the
attainment for Germany of equal rank with the British Empire, Japan, and the
United States--the only world powers to be left after the elimination of France
and the U.S.S.R.--through the acquisition of colonies in Africa and the
construction of a strong fleet with bases on the Atlantic. In the succeeding
generation Hitler foresaw a decisive conflict between Germany and the United
States, during which he hoped that Great Britain would be Germany's ally.

The conquest of the
European part of the Soviet Union, which in Hitler's calendar was dated
approximately for 1943-45, was to be preceded, he thought, by short localized
campaigns elsewhere in Europe to provide a strategic shield and to secure
Germany's rear for the great expedition of conquest in the East, which was also
bound up with the extermination of the Jews. The most important of the localized
campaigns would be that against France. While this European program remained
unfulfilled, it was imperative to avoid any world war, since only after the
German Reich had come to dominate the whole European continent would it have the
economic base and the territorial extent that were prerequisite for success in a
great war, especially against maritime world powers.

Hitler had always
contemplated the overthrow of the Soviet regime, and though he had congratulated
himself on the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939 as a matter of
expediency, anti-Bolshevism had remained his most profound emotional conviction.
His feelings had been stirred up afresh by the Soviet occupation of the Baltic
states and of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina in June 1940 and by the
consequent proximity of Soviet forces to the Romanian oil fields on which
Germany depended. Hitler became acutely suspicious of the intentions of the
Soviet leader,
Joseph Stalin, and he began to feel
that he could not afford to wait to complete the subjugation of western Europe
before dealing with the Soviet Union. Hitler and his generals had originally
scheduled the invasion of the U.S.S.R. for mid-May 1941, but the unforeseen
necessity of invading Yugoslavia and Greece in April of that year had forced
them to postpone the Soviet campaign to late June. The swiftness of Hitler's
Balkan victories enabled him to keep to this revised timetable, but the five
weeks' delay shortened the time for carrying out the invasion of the U.S.S.R.
and was to prove the more serious because in 1941 the Russian winter would
arrive earlier than usual. Nevertheless, Hitler and the heads of the
Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH, or German Army High Command), namely the army
commander in chief
Werner von Brauchitsch and the army
general staff chief
Franz Halder, were convinced that the
Red Army could be defeated in two or three months, and that, by the end of
October, the Germans would have conquered the whole European part of Russia and
the Ukraine west of a line stretching from Archangel to Astrakhan. The invasion
of the Soviet Union was given the code name
"Operation Barbarossa."

World War II:
Axis and Allied movements in Europe and North Africa, 1940-42, and (inset)
German invasion of the...

For
the campaign against the Soviet Union, the
Germans allotted almost 150 divisions
containing a total of about 3,000,000 men. Among these were 19 panzer divisions,
and in total the "Barbarossa" force had about 3,000 tanks, 7,000 artillery
pieces, and 2,500 aircraft. It was in effect the largest and most powerful
invasion force in human history. The Germans' strength was further increased by
more than 30 divisions of Finnish and Romanian troops.

The Soviet Union
had twice or perhaps three times the number of both tanks and aircraft as the
Germans had, but their aircraft were mostly obsolete. The Soviet tanks were
about equal to those of the Germans, however. A greater hindrance to Hitler's
chances of victory was that the German intelligence service underestimated the
troop reserves that Stalin could bring up from the depths of the U.S.S.R. The
Germans correctly estimated that there were about 150 divisions in the western
parts of the U.S.S.R. and reckoned that 50 more might be produced. But the
Soviets actually brought up more than 200 fresh divisions by the middle of
August, making a total of 360. The consequence was that, though the Germans
succeeded in shattering the original Soviet armies by superior technique, they
then found their path blocked by fresh ones. The effects of the miscalculations
were increased because much of August was wasted while Hitler and his advisers
were having long arguments as to what course they should follow after their
initial victories. Another factor in the Germans' calculations was purely
political, though no less mistaken; they believed that within three to six
months of their invasion, the Soviet regime would collapse from lack of domestic
support.

The German attack
on the Soviet Union was to have an immediate and highly salutary effect on Great
Britain's situation. Until then Britain's prospects had appeared hopeless in the
eyes of most people except the British themselves; and the government's decision
to continue the struggle after the fall of France and to reject Hitler's peace
offers could spell only slow suicide unless relief came from either the United
States or the U.S.S.R. Hitler brought Great Britain relief by turning eastward
and invading the Soviet Union just as the strain on Britain was becoming severe.

On June 22, 1941,
the German offensive was launched by three army groups under the same commanders
as in the invasion of France in 1940: on the left (north), an army group under
Leeb struck from East Prussia into the Baltic states toward Leningrad; on the
right (south), another army group, under Rundstedt, with an armoured group under
Kleist, advanced from southern Poland into the Ukraine against Kiev, whence it
was to wheel southeastward to the coasts of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov;
and in the centre, north of the Pripet Marshes, the main blow was delivered by
Bock's army group, with one armoured
group under Guderian and another under Hoth, thrusting northeastward at Smolensk
and
Moscow.

The invasion
along a 1,800-mile front took the Soviet leadership completely by surprise and
caught the Red Army in an unprepared and partially demobilized state. Piercing
the northern border, Guderian's tanks raced 50 miles beyond the frontier on the
first day of the invasion and were at Minsk, 200 miles beyond it, on June 27. At
Minsk they converged with Hoth's tanks, which had pierced the opposite flank,
but Bock's infantry could not follow up quickly enough to complete the
encirclement of the Soviet troops in the area; though 300,000 prisoners were
taken in the salient, a large part of the Soviet forces was able to escape to
the east. The Soviet armies were clumsily handled and frittered their tank
strength away in piecemeal action like that of the French in 1940. But the
isolated Soviet troops fought with a stubbornness that the French had not shown,
and their resistance imposed a brake by continuing to block road centres long
after the German tide had swept past them. The result was similar when
Guderian's tanks, having crossed the Dnepr River on July 10, entered Smolensk
six days later and converged with Hoth's thrust through Vitebsk: 200,000 Soviet
prisoners were taken; but some Soviet forces were withdrawn from the trap to the
line of the Desna, and a large pocket of resistance lay behind the German
armour. By mid-July, moreover, a series of rainstorms were turning the sandy
Russian roads into clogging mud, over which the wheeled vehicles of the German
transport behind the tanks could make only very slow progress. The Germans also
began to be hampered by the
scorched earth policy adopted by the
retreating Soviets. The Soviet troops burned crops, destroyed bridges, and
evacuated factories in the face of the German advance. Entire steel and
munitions plants in the westernmost portions of the U.S.S.R. were dismantled and
shipped by rail to the east, where they were put back into production. The
Soviets also destroyed or evacuated most of their rolling stock (railroad cars),
thus depriving the Germans of the use of the Soviet rail system, since Soviet
railroad track was of a different gauge than German track and German rolling
stock was consequently useless on it.

Nevertheless, by
mid-July the Germans had advanced more than 400 miles and were only 200 miles
from Moscow. They still had ample time to make decisive gains before the onset
of winter, but they lost the opportunity, primarily because of arguments
throughout August between Hitler and the OKH about the destination of the next
thrusts thence: whereas the OKH proposed Moscow as the main objective, Hitler
wanted the major effort to be directed southeastward, through the
Ukraine and the Donets Basin into the
Caucasus, with a minor swing northwestward against Leningrad (to converge with
Leeb's army group).

In the Ukraine,
meanwhile, Rundstedt and Kleist had made short work of the foremost Soviet
defenses, stronger though the latter had been. A new Soviet front south of Kiev
was broken by the end of July; and in the next fortnight the Germans swept down
to the Black Sea mouths of the Bug and Dnepr rivers--to converge with Romania's
simultaneous offensive. Kleist was then ordered to wheel northward from the
Ukraine, Guderian southward from Smolensk, for a pincer movement around the
Soviet forces behind Kiev; and by the end of September the claws of the
encircling movement had caught 520,000 men. These gigantic encirclements were
partly the fault of inept Soviet high commanders and partly the fault of Stalin,
who as commander in chief stubbornly overrode the advice of his generals and
ordered his armies to stand and fight instead of allowing them to retreat
eastward and regroup in preparation for a counteroffensive.

Winter was
approaching, and Hitler stopped Leeb's northward drive on the outskirts of
Leningrad. He ordered Rundstedt and Kleist, however, to press on from the Dnepr
toward the Don and the Caucasus; and Bock was to resume the advance on Moscow.

Bock's renewed
advance on Moscow began on Oct. 2, 1941. Its prospects looked bright when Bock's
armies brought off a great encirclement around
Vyazma, where 600,000 more Soviet
troops were captured. That left the Germans momentarily with an almost clear
path to Moscow. But the Vyazma battle had not been completed until late October;
the German troops were tired, the country became a morass as the weather got
worse, and fresh Soviet forces appeared in the path as they plodded slowly
forward. Some of the German generals wanted to break off the offensive and to
take up a suitable winter line. But Bock wanted to press on, believing that the
Soviets were on the verge of collapse, while Brauchitsch and Halder tended to
agree with his view. As that also accorded with Hitler's desire, he made no
objection. The temptation of Moscow, now so close in front of their eyes, was
too great for any of the topmost leaders to resist. On December 2 a further
effort was launched, and some German detachments penetrated into the suburbs of
Moscow; but the advance as a whole was held up in the forests covering the
capital. The stemming of this last phase of the great German offensive was
partly due to the effects of the Russian winter, whose subzero temperatures were
the most severe in several decades. In October and November a wave of frostbite
cases had decimated the ill-clad German troops, for whom provisions of winter
clothing had not been made, while the icy cold paralyzed the Germans' mechanized
transport, tanks, artillery, and aircraft. The Soviets, by contrast, were well
clad and tended to fight more effectively in winter than did the Germans. By
this time German casualties had mounted to levels that were unheard of in the
campaigns against France and the Balkans; by November the Germans had suffered
about 730,000 casualties.

In the south,
Kleist had already reached
Rostov-on-Don, gateway to the
Caucasus, on November 22, but had exhausted his tanks' fuel in doing so.
Rundstedt, seeing the place to be untenable, wanted to evacuate it but was
overruled by Hitler. A Soviet counteroffensive recaptured Rostov on November 28,
and Rundstedt was relieved of his command four days later. The Germans, however,
managed to establish a front on the Mius River--as Rundstedt had recommended.

As the German
drive against Moscow slackened, the Soviet commander on the Moscow front,
General
Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov, on
December 6 inaugurated the first great counteroffensive with strokes against
Bock's right in the Elets (Yelets) and Tula sectors south of Moscow and against
his centre in the Klin and Kalinin sectors to the northwest. Levies of Siberian
troops, who were extremely effective fighters in cold weather, were used for
these offensives. There followed a blow at the German left, in the Velikie Luki
sector; and the counteroffensive, which was sustained throughout the winter of
1941-42, soon took the form of a triple convergence toward Smolensk.

These Soviet
counteroffensives tumbled back the exhausted Germans, lapped around their
flanks, and produced a critical situation. From generals downward, the invaders
were filled with ghastly thoughts of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. In that
emergency Hitler forbade any retreat beyond the shortest possible local
withdrawals. His decision exposed his troops to awful sufferings in their
advanced positions facing Moscow, for they had neither the clothing nor the
equipment for a Russian winter campaign; but if they had once started a general
retreat it might easily have degenerated into a panic-stricken rout.

The Red Army's
winter counteroffensive continued for more than three months after its December
launching, though with diminishing progress. By March 1942 it had advanced more
than 150 miles in some sectors. But the Germans maintained their hold on the
main bastions of their winter front--such towns as Schlüsselburg, Novgorod,
Rzhev, Vyazma, Bryansk, Orël (Oryol), Kursk, Kharkov, and Taganrog--despite the
fact that the Soviets had often advanced many miles beyond these bastions, which
were in effect cut off. In retrospect, it became clear that Hitler's veto on any
extensive withdrawal worked out in such a way as to restore the confidence of
the German troops and probably saved them from a widespread collapse.
Nevertheless, they paid a heavy price indirectly for that rigid defense. One
immediate handicap was that the strength of the Luftwaffe was drained in the
prolonged effort to maintain supplies by air, under winter conditions, to the
garrisons of these more or less isolated bastion towns. The tremendous strain of
that winter campaign, on armies which had not been prepared for it, had other
serious effects. Before the winter ended, many German divisions were reduced to
barely a third of their original strength, and they were never fully built up
again.

The German plan
of campaign had begun to miscarry in August 1941, and its failure was patent
when the Soviet counteroffensive started. Nevertheless, having dismissed
Brauchitsch and appointed himself army commander in chief in December, Hitler
persisted in overruling the tentative opposition of the general staff to his
strategy.

The first three
months of the German-Soviet conflict produced cautious rapprochements between
the U.S.S.R. and Great Britain and between the U.S.S.R. and the United States.
The Anglo-Soviet agreement of July 12, 1941, pledged the signatory powers to
assist one another and to abstain from making any separate peace with Germany.
On Aug. 25, 1941, British and Soviet forces jointly invaded
Iran, to forestall the establishment
of a German base there and to divide the country into spheres of occupation for
the duration of the war; and late in September--at a conference in
Moscow--Soviet, British, and U.S. representatives formulated the monthly
quantities of supplies, including aircraft, tanks, and raw materials, that Great
Britain and the United States should try to furnish to the Soviet Union.

The critical
situation on the Eastern Front did not deter Hitler from declaring Germany to be
at war with the United States on Dec. 11, 1941, after the Japanese attack on the
U.S., British, and Dutch positions in the Pacific and in the Far East (see below
Japanese policy, 1939-41), since this
extension of hostilities did not immediately commit the German land forces to
any new theatre but at the same time had the merit of entitling the German Navy
to intensify the war at sea.

The war in the Pacific, 1938-41

In 1931-32 the
Japanese had invaded
Manchuria (Northeast China) and,
after overcoming ineffective Chinese resistance there, had created the
Japanese-controlled puppet state of Manchukuo. In the following years the
Nationalist government of China, headed by
Chiang Kai-shek, temporized in the
face of Japanese military and diplomatic pressures and instead waged an internal
war against the
Chinese Communists, led by Mao
Zedong, who were based in Shensi Province in north-central China. Meanwhile, the
Japanese began a military buildup in North China proper, which in turn
stimulated the formation of a unified resistance by the
Nationalists and the Communists.
Overt hostilities between Japan and China began after the Marco Polo Bridge
incident of July 7, 1937, when shots were exchanged between Chinese and Japanese
troops on the outskirts of Peking. Open fighting broke out in that area, and in
late July the Japanese captured the Peking-Tientsin area. Thereupon full-scale
hostilities began between the two nations. The Japanese landed near Shanghai, at
the mouth of the Yangtze River, and took Shanghai in November and the Chinese
capital,
Nanking, in December 1937. Chiang
Kai-shek moved his government to Han-k'ou (one of the Wu-han cities), which lay
435 miles west of Shanghai along the Yangtze. The Japanese also pushed southward
and westward from the Peking area into Hopeh and Shansi provinces. In 1938 the
Japanese launched several ambitious military campaigns that brought them deep
into the heart of central China. They advanced to the northeast and west from
Nanking, taking Suchow and occupying the Wu-han cities. The Nationalists were
forced to move their government to Chungking in Szechwan Province, about 500
miles west of the Wu-han cities. The Japanese also occupied Canton and several
other coastal cities in South China in 1938.

Nationalist Chinese
resistance to these Japanese advances was ineffective, primarily because the
Nationalist leadership was still more interested in holding their forces in
reserve for a future struggle with the Communists than in repelling the
Japanese. By contrast, the Communists, from their base in north-central China,
began an increasingly effective guerrilla war against the Japanese troops in
Manchuria and North China. The Japanese needed large numbers of troops to
maintain their hold on the immense Chinese territories and populations they
controlled. Of the 51 infantry divisions making up the Japanese Army in 1941, 38
of them, comprising about 750,000 men, were stationed in China (including
Manchuria).

Japanese policy, 1939-41

When war broke out in
Europe in September 1939, the Japanese, despite a series of victorious battles,
had still not brought their war in China to an end: on the one hand, the
Japanese strategists had made no plans to cope with the guerrilla warfare
pursued by the Chinese; on the other, the Japanese commanders in the field often
disregarded the orders of the supreme command at the Imperial headquarters and
occupied more Chinese territory than they had been ordered to take. Half of the
Japanese Army was thus still tied down in China when the commitment of Great
Britain and France to war against Germany opened up the prospect of wider
conquests for Japan in Southeast Asia and in the Pacific. Japan's military
ventures in China proper were consequently restricted rather more severely
henceforth.

The German victories over
The Netherlands and France in the summer of 1940 further encouraged the Japanese
premier, Prince
Konoe, to look southward at those
defeated powers' colonies and also, of course, at the British and U.S. positions
in the Far East. The island archipelago of the
Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia)
along with French
Indochina and British-held Malaya
contained raw materials (tin, rubber, petroleum) that were essential to Japan's
industrial economy, and if Japan could seize these regions and incorporate them
into the empire, it could make itself virtually self-sufficient economically and
thus become the dominant power in the Pacific Ocean. Since Great Britain,
single-handedly, was confronting the might of the Axis in Europe, the Japanese
strategists had to reckon, primarily, with the opposition of the United States
to their plans for territorial aggrandizement. When Japanese troops entered
northern Indochina in September 1940 (in pursuance of an agreement extorted in
August from the Vichy government of France), the United States uttered a
protest. Germany and Italy, by contrast, recognized Japan as the leading power
in the Far East by concluding with it the
Tripartite, or Axis, Pact of Sept.
27, 1940: negotiated by Japanese foreign minister
Matsuoka Yosuke, the pact pledged its
signatories to come to one another's help in the event of an attack "by a power
not already engaged in war." Japan also concluded a neutrality pact with the
U.S.S.R. on April 13, 1941.

On July 2, 1941, the
Imperial Conference decided to press the Japanese advance southward even at the
risk of war with Great Britain and the United States; and this policy was
pursued even when Matsuoka was relieved of office a fortnight later. On July 26,
in pursuance of a new agreement with Vichy France, Japanese forces began to
occupy bases in southern Indochina.

This time the
United States reacted vigorously, not
only freezing Japanese assets under U.S. control but also imposing an embargo on
supplies of oil to Japan. Dismay at the embargo drove the Japanese naval
command, which had hitherto been more moderate than the army, into collusion
with the army's extremism. When negotiations with the Dutch of Indonesia for an
alternative supply of oil produced no satisfaction, the Imperial Conference on
September 6, at the high command's insistence, decided that war must be
undertaken against the United States and Great Britain unless an understanding
with the United States could be reached in a few weeks' time.

General
Tojo
Hideki, who succeeded Konoe as premier in mid-October 1941, continued
the already desperate talks. The United States, however, persisted in making
demands that Japan could not concede: renunciation of the Tripartite Pact (which
would have left Japan diplomatically isolated); the withdrawal of Japanese
troops from China and from Southeast Asia (a humiliating retreat from an overt
commitment of four years' standing); and an open-door regime for trade in China.
When
Cordell Hull, the U.S. secretary of
state, on Nov. 26, 1941, sent an abrupt note to the Japanese bluntly requiring
them to evacuate China and Indochina and to recognize no Chinese regime other
than that of Chiang Kai-shek, the Japanese could see no point in continuing the
talks.

Since peace with the
United States seemed impossible, Japan set in motion its plans for war, which
would now necessarily be waged not only against the United States but also
against Great Britain (the existing war effort of which depended on U.S. support
and the Far Eastern colonies of which lay within the orbit of the projected
Japanese expansion) and against the Dutch East Indies (the oil of which was
essential to Japanese enterprises, even apart from geopolitical considerations).

The evolving Japanese
military strategy was based on the peculiar geography of the Pacific Ocean and
on the relative weakness and unpreparedness of the Allied military presence in
that ocean. The western half of the Pacific is dotted with many islands, large
and small, while the eastern half of the ocean is, with the exception of the
Hawaiian Islands, almost devoid of landmasses (and hence of usable bases). The
British, French, American, and Dutch military forces in the entire Pacific
region west of Hawaii amounted to only about 350,000 troops, most of them
lacking combat experience and being of disparate nationalities. Allied air power
in the Pacific was weak and consisted mostly of obsolete planes. If the
Japanese, with their large, well-equipped armies that had been battle-hardened
in China, could quickly launch coordinated attacks from their existing bases on
certain Japanese-mandated Pacific islands, on Formosa (Taiwan),
and from Japan itself, they could overwhelm the Allied forces, overrun the
entire western Pacific Ocean as well as Southeast Asia, and then develop those
areas' resources to their own military-industrial advantage. If successful in
their campaigns, the Japanese planned to establish a strongly fortified
defensive perimeter extending from Burma in the west to the southern rim of the
Dutch East Indies and northern New Guinea in the south and sweeping around to
the Gilbert and Marshall islands in the southeast and east. The Japanese
believed that any American and British counteroffensives against this perimeter
could be repelled, after which those nations would eventually seek a negotiated
peace that would allow Japan to keep her newly won empire.

Until the end of 1940 the
Japanese strategists had assumed that any new war to be waged would be against a
single enemy. When it became clear, in 1941, that the British and the Dutch as
well as the Americans must be attacked, a new and daring war plan was
successfully sponsored by the commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, Admiral
Yamamoto Isoroku.

Yamamoto's plan prescribed
two operations, together involving the whole strength of his navy, which was
composed of the following ships: 10 battleships, six regular aircraft carriers,
four auxiliary carriers, 18 heavy cruisers, 20 light cruisers, 112 destroyers,
65 submarines, and 2,274 combat planes. The first operation, to which all six
regular aircraft carriers, two battleships, three cruisers, and 11 destroyers
were allocated, was to be a surprise attack, scheduled for December 7 (December
8 by Japanese time), on the main U.S.
Pacific Fleet in its base at Pearl
Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands. The rest of the Japanese Navy was to support the
army in the "Southern Operation": 11 infantry divisions and seven tank
regiments, assisted by 795 combat planes, were to undertake two drives, one from
Formosa through the Philippines, the other from French Indochina and Hainan
Island through Malaya, so as to converge on the Dutch East Indies, with a view
to the capture of Java as the culmination of a campaign of 150 days--during
which, moreover, Wake Island, Guam, the Gilbert Islands, and Burma should also
have been secured as outer bastions, besides Hong Kong.

In accordance with
Yamamoto's plan, the aircraft carrier strike force commanded by Admiral Nagumo
Chuichi sailed westward undetected by any U.S. reconnaissance until it had
reached a point 275 miles north of Hawaii. From there, on Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941,
a total of about 360 aircraft, composed of dive-bombers, torpedo bombers, and a
few fighters, was launched in two waves in the early morning at the giant U.S.
naval base at Pearl Harbor. The base at that time was accommodating 70 U.S.
fighting ships, 24 auxiliaries, and some 300 planes. The Americans were taken
completely by surprise, and all eight battleships in the harbour were hit
(though six were eventually repaired and returned to service); three cruisers,
three destroyers, a minelayer, and other vessels were damaged; more than 180
aircraft were destroyed and others damaged (most while parked at airfields); and
more than 2,330 troops were killed and over 1,140 wounded. Japanese losses were
comparatively small. The Japanese attack failed in one crucial respect, however;
the Pacific Fleet's three aircraft carriers were at sea at the time of the
attack and escaped harm, and these were to become the nucleus of the United
States' incipient naval defense in the Pacific. Pearl Harbor's shore
installations and oil-storage facilities also escaped damage. The Pearl Harbor
attack, unannounced beforehand by the Japanese as it was, unified the American
public and swept away any remaining support for American neutrality in the war.
On December 8 the U.S. Congress declared
war on Japan with only one dissenting vote.

On the day of the attack,
December 8 by local time, Formosa-based Japanese bombers struck Clark and Iba
airfields in the
Philippines, destroying more than 50
percent of the U.S. Army's Far East aircraft; and, two days later, further raids
destroyed not only more U.S. fighters but also Cavite Naval Yard, likewise in
the Philippines. Part of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet, however, had already gone south
in November; and the surviving major ships and bomber aircraft, which were
vulnerable for lack of fighter protection, were withdrawn in the next fortnight
to safety in bases in Java and Australia.

Japanese forces began to
land on the island of Luzon in the Philippines on December 10. The main assault,
consisting of the bulk of one division, was made at Lingayen Gulf, 100 miles
north-northwest of
Manila, on December 22, and a second
large landing took place south of Manila two days later. Manila itself fell
unopposed to the Japanese on Jan. 2, 1942, but by that time the U.S. and
Filipino forces under General
Douglas MacArthur were ready to hold
Bataan Peninsula (across the bay from
Manila) and
Corregidor Island (in the bay). The
Japanese attack on Bataan was halted initially, but it was reinforced in the
following eight weeks. MacArthur was ordered to Australia on March 11, leaving
Bataan's defense to Lieutenant General
Jonathan M. Wainwright. The latter
and his men surrendered on April 9; Corregidor fell in the night of May 5-6; and
the southern Philippines capitulated three days later.

Japanese bombers had
already destroyed British air power at Hong Kong on Dec. 8, 1941, and the
British and Canadian defenders surrendered to the ground attack from the Kowloon
Peninsula (the nearest mainland) on December 25. To secure their flank while
pushing southward into Malaya, the Japanese also occupied Bangkok on December 9
and Victoria Point in southernmost Burma on December 16. The Japanese landings
in Malaya, from December 8 onward, accompanied as they were by air strikes,
overwhelmed the small Australian and Indian forces; and the British battleship
Prince of Wales and the battle
cruiser Repulse, sailing from Singapore to cut Japanese communications,
were sunk by Japanese aircraft on December 10. By the end of January 1942, two
Japanese divisions, with air and armoured support, had occupied all Malaya
except Singapore Island. In Burma, meanwhile, other Japanese troops had taken
Moulmein and were approaching Rangoon and Mandalay.

On the eastern perimeter
of the war zone, the Japanese had bombed Wake Island on December 8, attempted to
capture it on December 11, and achieved a landing on December 23, quickly
subduing the garrison. Guam had already fallen on December 10. Having also
occupied Makin and Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands in the first days of the war,
the Japanese successfully attacked Rabaul, the strategic base on New Britain
(now part of Papua New Guinea), on Jan. 23, 1942.

A unified
American-British-Dutch-Australian Command,
ABDACOM, under Wavell, responsible
for holding Malaya, Sumatra, Java, and the approaches to Australia, became
operative on Jan. 15, 1942; but the Japanese had already begun their advance on
the oil-rich Dutch East Indies. They occupied Kuching (December 17), Brunei Bay
(January 6), and Jesselton (January 11), on the northern coast of Borneo, as
well as Tarakan Island (off northeastern Borneo) and points on Celebes.
Balikpapan (on Borneo's east coast) and Kendari (in southeastern Celebes) fell
to the Japanese on Jan. 24, 1942, Amboina on February 4, Makasar City (in
southwestern Celebes) on February 8, and Bandjarmasin (in southern Borneo) on
February 16. Bali was invaded on February 18, and by February 24 the Japanese
were also in possession of Timor.

The fall of Singapore

Meanwhile, on February 8
and 9, three Japanese divisions had landed on Singapore Island; and on February
15 they forced the 90,000-strong British, Australian, and Indian garrison there,
under Lieutenant General A.E. Percival, to surrender. Singapore was the major
British base in the Pacific and had been regarded as unassailable due to its
strong seaward defenses. The Japanese took it with comparative ease by advancing
down the Malay Peninsula and then assaulting the base's landward side, which the
British had left inadequately defended. On February 13, moreover, Japanese
paratroopers had landed at Palembang in Sumatra, which fell to an amphibious
assault three days later.

When ABDACOM was dissolved
on Feb. 25, 1942, only
Java remained to complete the
Japanese program of conquest. The Allies' desperate attempt to intercept the
Japanese invasion fleet was defeated in the seven-hour
Battle of the Java Sea on February
27, in which five Allied warships were lost and only one Japanese destroyer
damaged. The Japanese landed at three points on Java on February 28 and rapidly
expanded their beachheads. On March 9 the 20,000 Allied troops in Java
surrendered. In the Indian Ocean, the Japanese captured the Andaman Islands on
March 23, and began a series of attacks on British shipping. After the failure
of ABDACOM, the U.S.-British Combined Chiefs of Staff placed the Pacific under
the U.S. Joint Chiefs' strategic direction. MacArthur became supreme commander
of the Southwest Pacific Area, which comprised the Dutch East Indies (less
Sumatra), the Philippines,
Australia, the Bismarck Archipelago,
and the Solomons; and Admiral
Chester W. Nimitz became commander in
chief of the Pacific Ocean Areas, which comprised virtually every area not under
MacArthur. Their missions were to hold the U.S.-Australia line of
communications, to contain the Japanese within the Pacific, to support the
defense of North America, and to prepare for major amphibious counteroffensives.

Japan's initial war plans
were realized with the capture of Java. But despite their military triumphs, the
Japanese saw no indication that the Allies were ready for a negotiated peace. On
the contrary, it seemed evident that an Allied counterstroke was in the making.
The U.S. Pacific Fleet bombed the Marshall Islands on Feb. 1, 1942, Wake Island
on February 23, and Marcus Island (between Wake and Japan) on March 1. These
moves, together with the bombing of Rabaul on February 23 and the establishment
of bases in Australia and a line of communications across the South Pacific,
made the Japanese decide to expand so as to cut the Allied line of
communications to Australia. They planned to occupy New Caledonia, the Fiji
Islands, and Samoa and also to seize eastern New Guinea, whence they would
threaten Australia from an air base to be established at Port Moresby. They
planned also to capture Midway Island in the North Pacific and to establish air
bases in the
Aleutians. In pursuance of this new
program, Japanese troops occupied Lae and Salamaua in New Guinea and Buka in the
Solomon Islands in March 1942 and
Bougainville in the Solomons and the Admiralty Islands (north of New Guinea)
early in April.

Something to raise the
Allies' morale was achieved on April 18, 1942, when 16 U.S. bombers raided
Tokyo--though they did little real
damage except to the Japanese government's prestige. Far more important were the
consequences of the U.S. intelligence services' detection of Japanese plans to
seize
Port Moresby and Tulagi (in the
southern Solomons). Had these two places fallen, Japanese aircraft could have
dominated the Coral Sea. In the event, after U.S. aircraft on May 3, 1942, had
interfered with the Japanese landing on Tulagi, U.S. naval units, with aircraft,
challenged the Japanese ships on their circuitous detour from Rabaul to Port
Moresby. On May 5 and 6 the opposing carrier groups sought each other out, and
the four-day
Battle of the Coral Sea ensued. On
May 7 planes from the Japanese carriers sank a U.S. destroyer and an oil tanker,
but U.S. planes sank the Japanese light carrier Shoho and a cruiser; and
the next day, though Japanese aircraft sank the U.S. carrier Lexington
and damaged the carrier Yorktown, the large Japanese carrier Shokaku
had to retire crippled. Finally, the Japanese lost so many planes in the battle
that their enterprise against Port Moresby had to be abandoned.

Despite the mixed results
of the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Japanese continued with their plan to seize
Midway Island. Seeking a naval
showdown with the remaining ships of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and counting on
their own numerical superiority to secure a victory, the Japanese mustered four
heavy and three light aircraft carriers, two seaplane carriers, 11 battleships,
15 cruisers, 44 destroyers, 15 submarines, and miscellaneous small vessels. The
U.S. Pacific Fleet had only three heavy carriers, eight cruisers, 18 destroyers,
and 19 submarines, though there were some 115 aircraft in support of it. The
Americans, however, had the incomparable advantage of knowing the intentions of
the Japanese in advance, thanks to the U.S. intelligence services' having broken
the Japanese Navy's code and deciphered key radio transmissions. In the ensuing
Battle of Midway, the Japanese ships
destined to take Midway Island were attacked while still 500 miles from their
target by U.S. bombers on June 3. The Japanese carriers were still able to
launch their aircraft against Midway early on June 4, but in the ensuing battle,
waves of carrier- and Midway-based U.S. bombers sank all four of the Japanese
heavy carriers and one heavy cruiser. Appalled by this disaster, the Japanese
began to retreat in the night of June 4-5. Though the U.S. carrier Yorktown
was sunk by torpedo on June 6, Midway was saved from invasion. In the Aleutians,
the Japanese bombed Dutch Harbor effectively and on June 7 occupied Attu and
Kiska.

The Battle of Midway was
probably the turning point of the war in the Pacific, for Japan lost its
first-line carrier strength and most of its navy's best trained pilots.
Henceforth, the naval strengths of the Japanese and of the Allies were virtually
equal. Having lost the strategic initiative, Japan canceled its plans to invade
New Caledonia, Fiji, and Samoa.

The Chinese front and Burma, 1941-42

Japan's entry into war
against the western Allies had its repercussions in China.
Chiang Kai-shek's government on Dec.
9, 1941, formally declared war not only against Japan (a formality long overdue)
but also, with political rather than military intent, against Germany and Italy.
Three Chinese armies were rushed to the Burmese frontier, since the
Burma Road was the only land route
whereby the western Allies could send supplies to the Nationalist Chinese
government. On Jan. 3, 1942, Chiang was recognized as supreme Allied commander
for the China theatre of war; and a U.S. general,
Joseph W. Stilwell, was sent to him
to be his chief of staff. In the first eight weeks after Pearl Harbor, however,
the major achievement of the Chinese was the definitive repulse, on Jan. 15,
1942, of a long-sustained Japanese drive against Ch'ang-sha, on the Canton-Han-k'ou
railway.

Thereafter, Chiang and
Stilwell were largely preoccupied by efforts to check the Japanese advance into
Burma. By mid-March 1942 two Chinese armies, under Stilwell's command, had
crossed the Burmese frontier; but before the end of the month the Chinese force
defending Toungoo, in central Burma between Rangoon and Mandalay, was nearly
annihilated by the more soldierly Japanese. British and Indian units in Burma
fared scarcely better, being driven into retreat by the enemy's numerical
superiority both in the air and on the ground. On April 29 the Japanese took
Lashio, the Burma Road's southern terminus, thus cutting the supply line to
China and turning the Allies' northern flank. Under continued pressure, the
British and Indian forces in the following month fell back through Kalewa to
Imphal (across the Indian border), while most of the Chinese retreated across
the Salween River into China. By the end of 1942 all of Burma was in Japanese
hands, China was effectively isolated (except by air), and
India was exposed to the danger of a
Japanese invasion through Burma.

Since the U.S. bombers
that raided Tokyo on April 18 flew on to Chinese airfields, particularly to
those in Chekiang (the coastal province south of Shanghai), the Japanese reacted
by launching a powerful offensive to seize those airfields. By the end of July
they had generally achieved their objectives.

Developments from autumn 1941 to spring 1942

Allied strategy and controversies, 1940-42

In the year following the
collapse of France in June 1940, British strategists, relying as they could on
supplies from the nonbelligerent United States, were concerned first with home
defense, second with the security of the British positions in the Middle East,
and third with the development of a war of attrition against the Axis powers,
pending the buildup of adequate forces for an invasion of the European
continent. For the United States, President Roosevelt's advisers, from November
1940, based their strategic plans on the "Europe first" principle: that is to
say, if the United States became engaged in war simultaneously against Germany,
Italy, and Japan, merely defensive operations should be conducted in the Pacific
(to protect at least the Alaska-Hawaii-Panama triangle) while an offensive was
being mounted in Europe.

Japan's entry into the war
terminated the nonbelligerency of the United States. The three weeks'
conference, named
Arcadia, that Roosevelt, Churchill,
and their advisers opened in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 22, 1941, reassured the
British about U.S. maintenance of the "Europe first" principle and also produced
two plans: a tentative one, code-named "Sledgehammer," for the buildup of an
offensive force in Great Britain, in case it should be decided to invade France;
and another, code-named "Super-Gymnast," for combining a British landing behind
the German forces in Libya (already planned under the code name "Gymnast") with
a U.S. landing near Casablanca on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. The same
conference furthermore created the machinery of the Combined Chiefs of Staff,
where the British Chiefs of Staff Committee was to be linked continuously,
through delegates in Washington, D.C., with the newly established U.S. Joint
Chiefs of Staff Organization, so that all aspects of the war could be studied in
concert. It was on Jan. 1, 1942, during the Arcadia Conference, that the
Declaration of the United Nations was signed in Washington, D.C., as a
collective statement of the Allies' war aims in sequel to the Atlantic Charter.

Meanwhile, Churchill
became anxious to do something to help the embattled Soviets--who were
clamouring for the United States and Britain to invade continental Europe so as
to take some of the German pressure off the Eastern Front. Roosevelt was no less
conscious than Churchill of the fact that the Soviet Union was bearing by far
the greatest burden of the war against Germany; and this consideration inclined
him to listen to the arguments of his Joint Chiefs of Staff Organization for a
change of plan. After some hesitation, he sent his confidant Harry Hopkins and
his army chief of staff General
George C. Marshall to London in April
1942 to suggest the scrapping of "Super-Gymnast" in favour of "Bolero," namely
the concentration of forces in Great Britain for a landing in Europe (perhaps at
Brest or at Cherbourg) in the autumn; then "Roundup," an invasion of France by
30 U.S. and 18 British divisions, could follow in April 1943. The British agreed
but soon began to doubt the practicability of mounting an amphibious invasion of
France at such an early date.

Attempts to conclude an
Anglo-Soviet political agreement were renewed without result, but a 20-year
Anglo-Soviet alliance was signed on May 26, 1942; and, though Churchill warned
Molotov not to expect an early second front in Europe, Molotov seemed gratified
by what he was told about Anglo-U.S. plans.

Visiting Roosevelt again
in the latter part of June 1942, Churchill at Hyde Park, N.Y., and in
Washington, D.C., pressed for a revised and enlarged joint operation in North
Africa before the end of the year, instead of a buildup for the invasion of
France; but the U.S. Joint Chiefs resolutely upheld the latter plan. After
further debate and disagreement, in July the U.S. Joint Chiefs yielded at last
to British obstinacy in favour of a North African enterprise: it was decided
that
"Torch," as this combined Anglo-U.S.
operation came to be called, should begin the following autumn.

Already, on July 17, 1942,
Churchill had had to notify Stalin that convoys of Allied supplies to northern
Russia must be suspended because of German submarine activity on the Arctic sea
route (on June 2 a convoy from Iceland had lost 23 out of 34 vessels).
Consequently, it was the more awkward to inform Stalin that there would be no
second front in Europe before 1943. In mid-August 1942, when Churchill went to
Moscow to break the news, Stalin raged against the retreat from the plan for a
second front in Europe but had to admit the military logic of "Torch."

In the Western Desert, a
major offensive against Rommel's front was undertaken on Nov. 18, 1941, by the
British 8th Army, commanded by Cunningham under the command in chief of Wavell's
successor in the Middle East, General Sir Claude Auchinleck. The offensive was
routed. General Neil Methuen Ritchie took Cunningham's place on November 25,
still more tanks were brought up, and a fortnight's resumed pressure constrained
Rommel to evacuate Cyrenaica and to retreat to Agedabia. There, however, Rommel
was at last, albeit meagrely, reinforced; and, after repulsing a British attack
on December 26, he prepared a counteroffensive. When the British still imagined
his forces to be hopelessly crippled, he attacked on Jan. 21, 1942, and, by a
series of strokes, drove the 8th Army back to the Gazala-Bir Hakeim line, just
west of Tobruk.

Both sides were
subsequently further reinforced. Then, on the night of May 26-27, Rommel passed
around Ritchie's southern flank with his three German divisions and two Italian
ones, leaving only four Italian divisions to face the Gazala line. Though at
first Rommel did some damage to the British tanks as they came into action
piecemeal from a weak position, he failed to break through to the coast behind
Gazala. In a single day one-third of Rommel's tank force was lost; and, after
another unsuccessful effort to reach the coast, he decided, on May 29, to take
up a defensive position.

The new German position,
aptly known as the Cauldron, seemed indeed to be perilously exposed; and
throughout the first days of June the British attacked it continually from the
air and from the ground, imagining that Rommel's armour was caught at last. The
British tanks, however, persisted in making direct assaults in small groups
against the Cauldron and were beaten off with very heavy losses; and Rommel,
meanwhile, secured his rear and his line of supply by overwhelming several
isolated British positions to the south.

Whereas in May 1942 the
British had had 700 tanks, with 200 more in reserve, against Rommel's 525, by
June 10 their present armoured strength was reduced, through their wasteful
tactics against the Cauldron, to 170, and most of the reserve was exhausted.
Suddenly then, on June 11, Rommel struck eastward, to catch most of the
remaining British armour in the converging fire of two panzer divisions. By
nightfall on June 13 the British had barely 70 tanks left, and Rommel, with some
150 still fit for action, was master of the battlefield.

The British on June 14
began a precipitate retreat from the Gazala line toward the Egyptian frontier. A
garrison of 33,000 men, however, with an immense quantity of material, was left
behind in Tobruk--on the retention of which Churchill characteristically and
most unfortunately insisted in successive telegrams from London. Rommel's prompt
reduction of Tobruk, achieved on June 21, 1942, was felt by Great Britain as a
national disaster second only to the loss of Singapore; and 80 percent of the
transport with which Rommel chased the remnant of the 8th Army eastward
consisted of captured British vehicles.

At this point Auchinleck
relieved Ritchie of his command and in a realistic and soldierly way ordered a
general British retreat back to the Alamein area. By June 30 the German tanks
were pressing against the British positions between el-Alamein (al-'Alamayn) and
the Qattara Depression, some 60 miles west of Alexandria, after an advance of
more than 350 miles from Gazala. Hitler and Mussolini could expect that within a
matter of days Rommel would be the master of Egypt.

The ensuing First
Battle of el-Alamein, which lasted
throughout July 1942, marked the end of the German hopes of a rapid victory.
Rommel's troops, having come so far and so fast, were exhausted; their first
assaults failed to break the defense rallied by Auchinleck; and they were also
subjected to disconcerting counterstrokes. At this point, the respite that
Rommel had to grant to his men gave Auchinleck time to bring up reinforcements.
By the end of July Rommel knew that it was he rather than Auchinleck who was now
on the defensive.

Auchinleck had saved Egypt
by halting Rommel's invasion, but his counterattacks had not driven it back.
Early in August, when Churchill arrived in Cairo to review the situation,
Auchinleck insisted on postponing the resumption of the offensive until
September, so that his new forces could be properly acclimatized and trained for
desert warfare. Impatient of this delay, Churchill removed Auchinleck from the
command in chief in the Middle East and gave the post to General
Sir Harold Alexander, while the
command of the 8th Army was transferred eventually (after the sudden death of
Churchill's first nominee) to General
Bernard Law Montgomery.
Paradoxically, Montgomery postponed the resumption of the offensive even longer
than Auchinleck had desired.

While the British in the
course of August raised their strength in armour at the front to some 700 tanks,
Rommel received only meagre reinforcement in the shape of infantry. He had,
however, about 200 gun-armed German tanks and also 240 Italian tanks (of an
obsolete model). With this armament, in the night of Aug. 30-31, 1942, he
launched a fresh attack, intending to capture by surprise the minefields on the
southern sector of the British front and then to drive eastward with his armour
for some 30 miles before wheeling north into the 8th Army's supply area on the
coast. In the event, the minefields proved unexpectedly deep, and by daybreak
Rommel's spearhead was only eight miles beyond them. Delayed on their eastward
drive and already under attack from the air, the two German panzer divisions of
the Afrika Korps had to make their wheel to the north at a much shorter distance
from the breach than Rommel had planned. Their assault thus ran mainly into the
position held by the British 22nd Armoured Brigade, to the southwest of the
ridge 'Alam al-Halfa'. Shortage of fuel on the German side and reinforced
defense on the British, together with intensification of the British bombing,
spelled the defeat of the offensive, and Rommel on September 2 decided to make a
gradual withdrawal.

The Germans' summer offensive in southern Russia, 1942

World War
II: Axis and Allied
movements in Europe and North Africa, 1940-42, and (inset) German invasion of
the...

The German plan to
launch another great summer offensive crystallized in the early months of 1942.
Hitler's decision was influenced by his economists, who mistakenly told him that
Germany could not continue the war unless it obtained petroleum supplies from
the Caucasus. Hitler was the more responsive to such arguments because they
coincided with his belief that another German offensive would so drain the
Soviet Union's manpower that the U.S.S.R. would be unable to continue the war.
His thinking was shared by his generals, who had been awed by the prodigality
with which the Soviets squandered their troops in the fighting of 1941 and the
spring of 1942. By this time at least 4,000,000 Soviet troops had been killed,
wounded, or captured, while German casualties totaled only 1,150,000.

In the early summer of
1942 the German southern line ran from Orël southward east of Kursk, through
Belgorod, and east of Kharkov down to the loop of the Soviet salient opposite
Izyum, beyond which it veered southeastward to Taganrog, on the northern coast
of the Sea of Azov. Before the Germans were ready for their principal offensive,
the Red Army in May started a drive against Kharkov; but this premature effort
actually served the Germans' purposes, since it not only preempted the Soviet
reserves but also provoked an immediate counterstroke against its southern
flank, where the Germans broke into the salient and reached the
Donets River near Izyum. The Germans
captured 240,000 Soviet prisoners in the encirclement that followed. In May also
the Germans drove the Soviet defenders of the Kerch Peninsula out of the Crimea;
and on June 3 the Germans began an assault against Sevastopol, which, however,
held out for a month.

The Germans' crossing of
the Donets near Izyum on June 10, 1942, was the prelude to their summer
offensive, which was launched at last on June 28: Field Marshal Maximilian von
Weichs's Army Group B, from the Kursk-Belgorod sector of the front, struck
toward the middle Don River opposite Voronezh, whence General Friedrich Paulus'
6th Army was to wheel southeastward against Stalingrad (Volgograd);
and List's Army Group A, from the front south of Kharkov, with Kleist's 1st
Panzer Army, struck toward the lower Don to take
Rostov and to thrust thence
northeastward against Stalingrad as well as southward into the vast oil fields
of
Caucasia. Army Group B swept rapidly
across a 100-mile stretch of plain to the Don and captured Voronezh on July 6.
The 1st Panzer Army drove 250 miles from its starting line and captured Rostov
on July 23. Once his forces had reached Rostov, Hitler decided to split his
troops so that they could both invade the rest of the Caucasus and take the
important industrial city of Stalingrad on the Volga River, 220 miles northeast
of Rostov. This decision was to have fatal consequences for the Germans, since
they lacked the resources to successfully take and hold both of these
objectives.

Maikop (Maykup), the great
oil centre 200 miles south of Rostov, fell to Kleist's right-hand column on
August 9, and Pyatigorsk, 150 miles east of Maikop, fell to his centre on the
same day, while the projected thrust against Stalingrad, in the opposite
direction from Rostov, was being developed. Shortage of fuel, however, slowed
the pace of Kleist's subsequent southeastward progress through the Caucasian
mountains; and, after forcing a passage over the Terek River near Mozdok early
in September, he was halted definitively just south of that river. From the end
of October 1942 the Caucasian front was stabilized; but the titanic struggle for
Stalingrad, draining manpower that might have won victory for the Germans in
Caucasia, was to rage on, fatefully, for three more months (see below
Stalingrad and the German retreat, summer
1942-February 1943). Already, however, it was evident that Hitler's
new offensive had fallen short of its objectives, and the scapegoat this time
was Halder, who was superseded by Kurt Zeitzler as chief of the army general
staff.

The Allies' first decisive successes

The Solomons, Papua, Madagascar, the Aleutians, and Burma, July 1942-May 1943

On July 2, 1942, the U.S.
Joint Chiefs of Staff ordered limited offensives in three stages to recapture
the New Britain-New Ireland-Solomons-eastern
New Guinea area: first, the seizure
of Tulagi and of the Santa Cruz Islands, with adjacent positions; second, the
occupation of the central and northern Solomons and of the northeast coast of
New Guinea; third, the seizure of
Rabaul and of other points in the
Bismarck Archipelago.

On July 6 the Japanese
landed troops on
Guadalcanal, one of the southern
Solomons, and began to construct an air base. The Allied high command, fearing
further Japanese advances southeastward, sped into the area to dislodge the
enemy and to obtain a base for later advances toward Japan's main base in the
theatre, Rabaul. The U.S. 1st Marine Division poured ashore on August 7 and
secured Guadalcanal's airfield, Tulagi's harbour, and neighbouring islands by
dusk on August 8--the Pacific war's first major Allied offensive. During the
night of August 8-9, Japanese cruisers and destroyers, attempting to hold
Guadalcanal, sank four U.S. cruisers, themselves sustaining one cruiser sunk and
one damaged and later sunk. On August 23-25, in the
Battle of the Eastern Solomons, the
Japanese lost a light carrier, a destroyer, and a submarine and sustained damage
to a cruiser and to a seaplane carrier but sank an Allied destroyer and crippled
a cruiser. On August 31 another U.S. carrier was disabled, and on September 15
Japanese submarines sank the carrier Wasp and damaged a battleship.
Meanwhile, more than 6,000 Japanese reinforced their Guadalcanal garrison,
attacking the Marines' beachhead on August 20-21 and on September 12-14. On
September 18 some U.S. reinforcements arrived, and mid-October saw about 22,000
Japanese ranged against 23,000 U.S. troops. The sea battles of Cape Esperance
and of the Santa Cruz Islands--in which two Japanese cruisers and two destroyers
were sunk and three carriers and two destroyers damaged in return for the loss
of one U.S. carrier and two destroyers, besides damage to six other Allied
ships--thwarted an attempt to reinforce further the Japanese ground troops,
whose attack proved a failure (October 20-29).

After October, Allied
strength was built up. Another Japanese attempt at counter-reinforcement led to
the naval
Battle of Guadalcanal, fought on
November 13-15: it cost Japan two battleships, three destroyers, one cruiser,
two submarines, and 11 transports and the Allies (now under Admiral William F.
Halsey) two cruisers and seven destroyers sunk and one battleship and one
cruiser damaged. Only 4,000 Japanese troops out of 12,500 managed to reach land,
without equipment; and on November 30 eight Japanese destroyers, attempting to
land more troops, were beaten off in the
Battle of Tassafaronga, losing one
destroyer sunk and one crippled, at an Allied cost of one cruiser sunk and three
damaged.

By Jan. 5, 1943,
Guadalcanal's Allied garrison totaled 44,000, against 22,500 Japanese. The
Japanese decided to evacuate the position, carrying away 12,000 men in early
February in daring destroyer runs. In ground warfare Japanese losses were more
than 24,000 for the Guadalcanal campaign, Allied losses about 1,600 killed and
4,250 wounded (figures that ignore the higher number of casualties from
disease). On February 21, U.S. infantry began occupying the Russell Islands, to
support advances on Rabaul.

Earlier, before Allied
plans to secure eastern New Guinea had been implemented, the Japanese had landed
near Gona on the north coast of Papua (the southeastern extremity of the great
island) on July 24, 1942, in an attempt to reach
Port Moresby overland, via the Kokoda
Trail. Advanced Japanese units from the north, despite Australian opposition,
had reached a ridge 32 miles from Port Moresby by mid-September. Then, however,
they had to withdraw exhausted to Gona and to nearby Buna, where there were some
7,500 Japanese assembled by November 18. The next day U.S. infantry attacked
them there. Each side was subsequently reinforced; but the Australians took Gona
on December 9 and the Americans Buna village on December 14. Buna government
station fell to the Allies on Jan. 2, 1943, Sanananda on January 18, and all
Japanese resistance in Papua ceased on January 22.

The retaking of
Guadalcanal and Papua ended the Japanese drive south, and communications with
Australia and New Zealand were now secure. Altogether, Papua cost Japan nearly
12,000 killed and 350 captured. Allied losses were 3,300 killed and 5,500
wounded. Allied air forces had played a particularly important role,
interdicting Japanese supply lines and transporting Allied supplies and
reinforcements.

Japan, having lost
Guadalcanal, fought henceforth defensively, with worsening prospects. Its final
effort to reinforce the Lae-Salamaua position in New Guinea from the stronghold
of Rabaul was a disaster: in the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, on March 2-4, 1943,
the Japanese lost four destroyers and eight transports, and only 1,000 of the
7,000 troops reached their destination. On March 25 the Japanese Army and Navy
high commands agreed on a policy of strengthening the defense of strategic
points and of counterattacking wherever possible, priority being given to the
defense of the remaining Japanese positions in New Guinea, with secondary
emphasis on the Solomon Islands. In the following three weeks, however, the
Allies improved their own position in New Guinea, and Japanese intervention was
confined to air attacks. Before the end of April, moreover, the Japanese Navy
sustained a disaster: the guiding genius of the Japanese war effort,
Yamamoto, was sent late in March to
command the forces based on Rabaul but was killed in an American air ambush on a
flight to Bougainville.

Developments of the
Allies' war against Japan also took place outside the southwest Pacific area.
British forces in the summer of 1942 invaded Vichy French-held
Madagascar. A renewed British
offensive in September 1942 overran the island; hostilities ceased on November
5, and a Free French administration of Madagascar took office on Jan. 8, 1943.
In the North Pacific, meanwhile, the United States had decided to expel the
Japanese from the
Aleutians. Having landed forces on
Adak in August 1942, they began air attacks against
Kiska and
Attu from Adak the next month and
from Amchitka also in the following January, while a naval blockade prevented
the Japanese from reinforcing their garrisons. Finally, U.S. troops, bypassing
Kiska, invaded Attu on May 11, 1943--to kill most of the island's 2,300
defenders in three weeks of fighting. The Japanese then evacuated Kiska. Bases
in the Aleutians thenceforth facilitated the Allies' bombing of the Kuril
Islands.

Burma, autumn 1942-summer 1943

On the Burmese front the
Allies found they could do little to dislodge the Japanese from their occupation
of that country, and what little the Allies did attempt proved abortive.
Brigadier General Orde
Wingate's"Chindits," which were long-range
penetration groups depending on supplies from the air, crossed the Chindwin
River in February 1943 and were initially successful in severing Japanese
communications on the railroad between Mandalay and Myitkyina. But the Chindits
soon found themselves in unfavourable terrain and in grave danger of
encirclement, and so they made their way back to India.

In May 1943, however, the
Allies reorganized their system of command for Southeast Asia. Vice Admiral Lord
Louis
Mountbatten was appointed supreme
commander of the South East Asia Command (SEAC), and
Stilwell was appointed deputy to
Mountbatten. Stilwell at the same time was chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek.
The British-Indian forces destined for Burma meanwhile constituted the 14th
Army, under Lieutenant General William Slim, whose operational control Stilwell
agreed to accept. Shortly afterward, Auchinleck succeeded Wavell as commander in
chief in India.

While Churchill was still
chafing in London about his generals' delay in resuming the offensive in Egypt,
Montgomery waited for seven weeks after 'Alam al-Halfa' in order to be sure of
success. He finally chose to begin his attack in the night of Oct. 23-24, 1942,
when there would be moonlight for the clearing of gaps in the German minefields.

By mid-October the British
8th Army had 230,000 men and 1,230 gun-armed tanks ready for action, while the
German-Italian forces numbered only 80,000 men, with only 210 tanks of
comparable quality ready; and in air support the British enjoyed a superiority
of 1,500 to 350. Allied air and submarine attacks on the Axis supply lines
across the Mediterranean, moreover, had prevented Rommel's army from receiving
adequate replenishments of fuel, ammunition, and food; and Rommel himself, who
had been ill before 'Alam al-Halfa', was convalescing in Austria.

The British launched their
infantry attack at el-Alamein at 10:00 PM on Oct. 23, 1942, but found the German
minefields harder to clear than they had foreseen. Two days later, however, some
of those tanks were deploying six miles beyond the original front. When Rommel,
ordered back to
Africa by Hitler, reached the front
in the evening of October 25, half of the Germans' available armour was already
destroyed. Nevertheless, the impetus of the British onslaught was stopped the
next day, when German antitank guns took a heavy toll of armour trying to deepen
the westward penetration. In the night of October 28 Montgomery turned the
offensive northward from the wedge, but this drive likewise miscarried. In the
first week of their offensive the British lost four times as many tanks as the
Germans but still had 800 available against the latter's remaining 90.

When Montgomery switched
the British line of attack back to its original direction, early on Nov. 2,
1942, Rommel was no longer strong enough to withstand him. After expensive
resistance throughout the daytime, he ordered a retreat to Fuka (Fukah);
but in the afternoon of November 3 the retreat was fatally countermanded by
Hitler, who insisted that the Alamein position be held. The 36 hours wasted in
obeying this long-distance instruction cost Rommel his chance of making a stand
at Fuka: when he resumed his retreat, he had to race much farther back to
escape successive British attempts to intercept him on the coast road by
scythelike sweeps from the south. A fortnight after resuming his withdrawal from
el-Alamein, Rommel was 700 miles to the west, at the traditional backstop of
Agheila. As the British took their time to mount their attacks, he fell back
farther by stages: after three weeks, 200 miles to Buerat (al-Bu'ayrat); after
three more weeks, in mid-January 1943, the whole distance of 350 miles past
Tripoli to the Mareth Line within the frontiers of Tunisia. By that time the
Axis position in Tunisia was being battered from the west, through the execution
of "Torch."

Stalingrad and the German retreat, summer 1942-February 1943

The German 4th Panzer
Army, after being diverted to the south to help Kleist's attack on Rostov late
in July 1942 (see above
The Germans' summer offensive in southern
Russia, 1942), was redirected toward
Stalingrad a fortnight later.
Stalingrad was a large industrial city producing armaments and tractors; it
stretched for 30 miles along the banks of the Volga River. By the end of August
the 4th Army's northeastward advance against the city was converging with the
eastward advance of the 6th Army, under General
Friedrich Paulus, with 330,000 of the
German Army's finest troops. The Red Army, however, put up the most determined
resistance, yielding ground only very slowly and at a high cost as the 6th Army
approached Stalingrad. On August 23 a German spearhead penetrated the city's
northern suburbs, and the Luftwaffe rained incendiary bombs that destroyed most
of the city's wooden housing. The Soviet 62nd Army was pushed back into
Stalingrad proper, where, under the command of General Vasily I.
Chuikov, it made a determined stand.
Meanwhile, the Germans' concentration on Stalingrad was increasingly draining
reserves from their flank cover, which was already strained by having to stretch
so far--400 miles on the left (north), as far as Voronezh, 400 again on the
right (south), as far as the Terek River. By mid-September the Germans had
pushed the Soviet forces in Stalingrad back until the latter occupied only a
nine-mile-long strip of the city along the Volga, and this strip was only two or
three miles wide. The Soviets had to supply their troops by barge and boat
across the Volga from the other bank. At this point Stalingrad became the scene
of some of the fiercest and most concentrated fighting of the war; streets,
blocks, and individual buildings were fought over by many small units of troops
and often changed hands again and again. The city's remaining buildings were
pounded into rubble by the unrelenting close combat. The most critical moment
came on October 14, when the Soviet defenders had their backs so close to the
Volga that the few remaining supply crossings of the river came under German
machine-gun fire. The Germans, however, were growing dispirited by heavy losses,
by fatigue, and by the approach of winter.

A huge Soviet
counteroffensive, planned by generals
G.K. Zhukov, A.M. Vasilevsky, and
Nikolay Nikolayevich Voronov, was launched on Nov. 19-20, 1942, in two
spearheads, north and south of the German salient whose tip was at Stalingrad.
The twin pincers of this counteroffensive struck the flanks of the German
salient at points about 50 miles north and 50 miles south of Stalingrad and were
designed to isolate the 250,000 remaining men of the German 6th and 4th armies
in the city. The attacks quickly penetrated deep into the flanks, and by
November 23 the two prongs of the attack had linked up about 60 miles west of
Stalingrad; the encirclement of the two German armies in Stalingrad was
complete. The German high command urged Hitler to allow Paulus and his forces to
break out of the encirclement and rejoin the main German forces west of the
city, but Hitler would not contemplate a retreat from the Volga River and
ordered Paulus to "stand and fight." With winter setting in and food and medical
supplies dwindling, Paulus' forces grew weaker. In mid-December Hitler allowed
one of the most talented German commanders, Field Marshal
Erich von Manstein, to form a special
army corps to rescue Paulus' forces by fighting its way eastward, but Hitler
refused to let Paulus fight his way westward at the same time in order to link
up with Manstein. This fatal decision doomed Paulus' forces, since the main
German forces now simply lacked the reserves needed to break through the Soviet
encirclement single handedly. Hitler exhorted the trapped German forces to fight
to the death, but on Jan. 31, 1943, Paulus surrendered; 91,000 frozen, starving
men (all that was left of the 6th and 4th armies) and 24 generals surrendered
with him.

Besides being the greatest
battle of the war, Stalingrad proved to be the turning point of the military
struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union. The battle used up precious
German reserves, destroyed two entire armies, and humiliated the prestigious
German war machine. It also marked the increasing skill and professionalism of a
group of younger Soviet generals who had emerged as capable commanders, chief
among whom was Zhukov.

Meanwhile, early in
January 1943, only just in time, Hitler acknowledged that the encirclement of
the Germans in Stalingrad would lead to an even worse disaster unless he
extricated his forces from the Caucasus. Kleist was therefore ordered to
retreat, while his northern flank of 600 miles was still protected by the
desperate resistance of the encircled Paulus. Kleist's forces were making their
way back across the Don at Rostov when Paulus at last surrendered. Had Paulus
surrendered three weeks earlier (after seven weeks of isolation), Kleist's
escape would have been impossible.

Even west of Rostov there
were threats to
Kleist's line of retreat. In January,
two Soviet armies, the one under General
Nikolay Fyodorovich Vatutin, the
other under General Filipp Ivanovich Golikov, had crossed the Don upstream from
Serafimovich and were thrusting southwestward to the Donets between Kamensk and
Kharkov: Vatutin's forces, having crossed the Donets at Izyum, took Lozovaya
Junction on February 11, Golikov's took Kharkov five days later. Farther to the
north, a third Soviet army, under General Ivan Danilovich Chernyakhovsky, had
initiated a drive westward from Voronezh on February 2 and had retaken Kursk on
February 8. Thus, the Germans had to retreat from all the territory they had
taken in their great summer offensive in 1942. The Caucasus returned to Soviet
hands.

A sudden thaw supervened
to hamper the Red Army's transport of supplies and reinforcements across the
swollen courses of the great rivers. With the momentum of the Soviet
counteroffensive thus slowed, the Germans made good their retreat to the Dnepr
along the easier routes of the Black Sea littoral and were able, before the end
of February 1943, to mount a counteroffensive of their own.

The invasion of northwest Africa, November-December 1942

When the U.S. and British
strategists had decided on "Torch"
(Allied landings on the western coast of North Africa) late in July 1942, it
remained to settle the practical details of the operation. The purpose of
"Torch" was to hem Rommel's forces in between U.S. troops on the west and
British troops to the east. After considerable discussion, it was finally agreed
that landings, under the supreme command of Major General
Dwight D. Eisenhower, should be made
on November 8 at three places in the vicinity of
Casablanca on the Atlantic coast of
Morocco and on beaches near Oran and
near Algiers itself on the Mediterranean coast of Algeria. The amphibious
landings would involve a total of about 110,000 troops, most of them Americans.

The conciliation of the
French on whose colonial territory the landings would be made was a more
delicate matter. All of French North Africa was still loyal to the Vichy
government of Marshal Pétain, with which the United States, unlike Great
Britain, was still formally maintaining diplomatic relations. Thus, the French
commander in chief in Algeria, General Alphonse Juin, and his counterpart in
Morocco, General Charles-Auguste Nogučs, were subordinate to the supreme
commander of all Vichy's forces, namely Admiral
Jean-François Darlan. American
diplomats and generals tried to gain these officers' collaboration with the
Allies in the landings, for it was vital to try to avoid a situation in which
Vichy French troops put up armed resistance to the landings at the beaches.

The U.S.-British landings
at Algiers began on November 8 and were met by little French resistance. The
simultaneous landings near Oran met stiffer resistance, and on November 9 the
whole U.S. plan of operations was dislocated by a French counterattack on the
Arzew beachhead. Around Casablanca the U.S. landings were accomplished without
difficulty, but resistance developed when the invaders tried to expand their
beachheads. On November 10, however, the fighting was called off; and next day
the French authorities in Morocco concluded an armistice with the Americans.

The landing in Algiers,
meanwhile, was complicated by the fact that Darlan himself was in the city at
the time. The situation was muddled, with some French troops loyal to Pétain
while others backed de Gaulle and the anti-Vichy French general whom the Allies
were sponsoring in North Africa,
Henri Giraud.

On Nov. 11, 1942, in
reaction to the Allied landings, German and Italian forces overran southern
France, the metropolitan territory hitherto under Pétain's immediate authority.
This event helped induce Nogučs and the other French commanders in Algeria to
assent to Darlan's proposals for a working agreement with the Allies, including
recognition of Giraud as military commander in chief of the French forces.
Concluded on November 13, the agreement was promptly endorsed by Eisenhower.
French West Africa, including Senegal, with the port of Dakar, likewise followed
Darlan's lead. The Germans, however, by mining the exit from the harbour of
Toulon, forestalled plans for the escape of the main French fleet from
metropolitan France to North Africa: on November 27, the French crews scuttled
their ships to avoid capture. On Dec. 24, 1942, Darlan was assassinated; both
Royalist and Gaullist circles in North Africa had steadfastly objected to him on
political grounds. Giraud thereupon took his place, for a time, as French high
commissioner in North Africa.

Axis troops had begun to
arrive in Tunisia as early as Nov. 9, 1942, and were reinforced in the following
fortnight until they numbered about 20,000 combat troops (which were
subsequently heavily reinforced by air). Thus, when the British general Kenneth
Anderson, designated to command the invasion of Tunisia from the west with the
Allied 1st Army, started his offensive on November 25, the defense was
unexpectedly strong. By December 5 the 1st Army's advance was checked a dozen
miles from Tunis and from Bizerte. Further reinforcements enabled Colonel
General Jürgen von Arnim, who assumed the command in chief of the Axis defense
in Tunisia on December 9, to expand his two bridgeheads in Tunisia until they
were merged into one. Germany and Italy had won the race for Tunis but were
henceforth to succumb to the lure of retaining their prize regardless of the
greater need of conserving their strength for the defense of Europe.

After Rommel had fallen
back from Libya to the Mareth Line in mid-January 1943 (see above
Montgomery's Battle of el-Alamein and Rommel's
retreat, 1942-43), two German armies, Arnim's and Rommel's, were
holding the north and the south of the eastern littoral both against Anderson's
1st Army attacking from the west and against Montgomery's 8th from the
southeast. Rommel judged that a counterstroke should be delivered first against
the Allies in the west. Accordingly, on February 14 the Axis forces delivered a
major attack against U.S. forces between the Fa'id Pass in the north and
Gafsa in the south. West of Fa'id, the 21st Panzer Division, under
General Heinz Ziegler, destroyed 100 U.S. tanks and drove the Americans back 50
miles. In the Kasserine Pass, however, the Allies put up some stiffer
opposition.

When on February 19 Rommel
received authority to continue his attack, he was ordered to advance not against
Tébessa but northward from Kasserine against Thala--where, in fact, Alexander
was expecting him. Having overcome the stubborn U.S. resistance in the Kasserine
Pass on February 20, the Germans entered Thala the next day, only to be expelled
a few hours later by Alexander's reserve troops. His chance having been
forfeited, Rommel began a gradual withdrawal on February 22.

The delays ensuing from
the frustration of Rommel's stroke against the 1st Army reduced the
effectiveness of his stroke against the 8th. Whereas on Feb. 26, 1943,
Montgomery had had only one division facing the Mareth Line, he quadrupled his
strength in the following week, massing 400 tanks and 500 antitank guns.
Rommel's attack, on March 6, was
brought to an early halt, and 50 German tanks were lost. A sick man and a
disappointed soldier, Rommel relinquished his command.

The Allied 1st Army
resumed the offensive on March 17, with attacks by the U.S. II Corps, under
General
George Patton, on the roads through
the mountains, with the aim of cutting the
Afrika Korps' line of retreat up the
coast to Tunis; but these attacks were checked by the Germans in the passes. In
the night of March 20-21, however, the British 8th Army launched a frontal
assault on the Mareth Line, combined with an outflanking movement by the New
Zealand Corps toward el-Hamma (al-Hammah) in the Germans' rear; and a few
days later, seeing the frontal assault to have failed, Montgomery switched the
main weight of his attack to the flank. Threatened with encirclement, the
Germans decided to abandon the Mareth Line, which the 8th Army occupied on March
28; but the German defenses at el-Hamma held out long enough to enable the rest
of the Afrika Korps to retreat without much loss to a new line on the Wadi al-'Akarit,
north of Gabčs. The new line, however, was breached by the 8th Army on April 6;
and, meanwhile, the Americans were also advancing on the Axis troops' rear from
Gafsa. By the following morning the Afrika Korps was retreating rapidly
northward along the littoral toward Tunis, and by April 11 it had joined hands
with Arnim's forces for the defense of a 100-mile perimeter stretching around
Tunis and Bizerte (Banzart).

Thanks to the rapidity of
the Afrika Korps' retreat from Wadi al-'Akarit, the German high command had an
opportunity to withdraw its forces from the rump of Tunisia to Sicily, but it
chose instead to defend the indefensible rump. The defenders indeed withstood
the converging assaults that the 8th and 1st armies delivered against the
perimeter from April 20 to April 23; but on May 6 a concentrated attack by
Allied artillery, aircraft, infantry, and tanks was launched on the two-mile
front of the Medjerda (Majardah) Valley leading to Tunis; and on May 7 the city
fell to the leading British armoured forces, while the Americans and the French
almost simultaneously captured Bizerte. At the same time, the Germans' line of
retreat into the Cap Bon Peninsula was severed by an armoured division's swift
turn southeastward from Tunis. A general collapse of the German resistance
followed, the Allies taking more than 250,000 prisoners, including 125,000
German troops and Arnim himself. North Africa had been cleared of Axis forces
and was now completely in Allied hands. Its capture insured the safety of Allied
shipping and naval movements throughout the Mediterranean, and North Africa
would serve as a base for future Allied operations against Italy itself.

The Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the North Sea, 1942-45

The year 1942 was, on the
whole, a favourable one for the German
U-boats. First, the U.S. entry into
the war entitled them to infest the U.S. coast of the North Atlantic; and it was
not until the middle of the year that the Allies' introduction of the convoy
system from the Caribbean northward constrained the raiders to go so far afield
as the waters between Brazil and West Africa. Second, U-tankers were developed;
i.e., large converted U-boats equipped to provide fuel, torpedoes, and
other supplies to U-boats operating in remote waters. In the course of 1942, the
U-boats sank more than 6,266,000 tons of shipping; and, since in the same period
their operational strength rose from 91 to 212, it seemed conceivable that they
might soon score their desired target of 800,000 tons of sinkings per month.

March 1943 saw the climax
of the U-boats' good fortune: their strength rose to 240; they sank in that
single month 627,377 tons of shipping; and, in the greatest
convoy battle of the war, when 20 of
them attacked two convoys merged into one, they sank 21 ships (141,000 tons) out
of 77 with the loss of only one of their own number. The anticlimax followed,
thanks to five developments of the Allies' counteraction: "support groups" were
reintroduced; aircraft carriers became progressively available for escorts; more
and more long-range Liberator aircraft began to cover the convoys offshore;
ships were equipped with a radar set of very short wavelength, the probing of
which was undetectable to the U-boats; and a regular offensive against U-boats
on their transit routes was launched from the air (56 were destroyed in
April-May 1943). The U-boats sank 327,943 tons in April, 264,852 in May, only
95,753 in June 1943; and for the rest of the war monthly totals were less than
100,000 tons except in July and September 1943 and in March 1944.

Late in 1944 the U-boats
were equipped with the
snorkel breathing tube, which
provided them with the necessary oxygen to recharge their batteries under water
and so converted them from submersible torpedo boats into almost complete
submarines virtually undetectable to radar. About the same time a new model of
U-boat, with greater underwater speed and endurance, came into operation. These
improvements came too late, however, because the Allies' surface and air
resources for the protection of the convoys were already overwhelming.

Air warfare, 1942-43

Early in 1942 the RAF
bomber command, headed by
Sir Arthur Harris, began an
intensification of the Allies' growing
strategic air offensive against
Germany. These attacks, which were aimed against factories, rail depots,
dockyards, bridges, and dams and against cities and towns themselves, were
intended to both destroy Germany's war industries and to deprive its civilian
population of their housing, thus sapping their will to continue the war. The
characteristic feature of the new program was its emphasis on
area bombing, in which the centres of
towns would be the points of aim for nocturnal raids.

Already in March 1942 an
exceptionally destructive bombing raid, using the Germans' own incendiary
method, had been made on Lübeck; and intensive attacks were also made on Essen
(site of the Krupp munitions works) and other Ruhr towns. In the night of May
30-31 more than 1,000 bombers were dispatched against Cologne, where they did
heavy damage to one-third of that city's built-up area. Such operations,
however, became highly expensive to the bomber command, particularly because of
the defense put up by the German night fighter force. Interrupted for two months
during which the bombers concentrated their attention on U-boat bases on the Bay
of Biscay, the air offensive against Germany was resumed in March 1943. In the
following 12 months, moreover, its resources were to be increased formidably, so
that by March 1944 the bomber command's average daily operational strength had
risen to 974 from about 500 in 1942. These numbers helped the RAF to concentrate
effectively against major industrial targets, such as those in the
Ruhr. The phases of the resumed
offensive were: (1) the Battle of the Ruhr, from March to July 1943, comprising
18,506 sorties and costing 872 aircraft shot down and 2,126 damaged, its most
memorable operation being that of the night of May 16-17, when the Möhne Dam in
the Ruhr Basin and the Eder Dam in the Weser Basin were breached, (2) the Battle
of
Hamburg, from July to November 1943,
comprising 17,021 sorties and costing 695 bombers lost and 1,123 damaged but,
nevertheless, thanks in part to the new Window antiradar and "H2S"
radar devices, achieving an
unprecedented measure of devastation, since four out of its 33 major actions,
with a little help from minor attacks, killed about 40,000 people and drove
nearly 1,000,000 from their homes, and (3) the Battle of Berlin, from November
1943 to March 1944, comprising 20,224 sorties but costing 1,047 bombers lost and
1,682 returned damaged and achieving, on the whole, less devastation than the
Battle of Hamburg.

The U.S. 8th Air Force,
based in Great Britain, also took part in the strategic offensive against
Germany from January 1943. Its bombers,
Flying Fortresses and
Liberators, attacked industrial
targets in daylight. They proved, however, to be very vulnerable to German
fighter attack whenever they went beyond the range of their own escort of
fighters--that is to say, farther than the distance from Norfolk to Aachen: the
raid against the important ball-bearing factory at Schweinfurt, for instance, on
Oct. 14, 1943, lost 60 out of the 291 bombers participating, and 138 of those
that returned were damaged. Not until December 1943 was the P-51B (Mustang III)
brought into operation with the 8th Air Force--a long-range fighter that
portended a change in the balance of air power. The Germans, meanwhile,
continued to increase their production of aircraft and, in particular, of their
highly successful fighters.

German-occupied Europe

Hitler's racist ideology
and his brutal conception of power politics caused him to pursue certain aims in
those European countries conquered by the Germans in the period 1939-42. Hitler
intended that those western and northern European areas in which civil
administrations were installed--The Netherlands and Norway--would at some later
date become part of the German Reich, or nation. Those countries left by Germany
under military administration (which originally had been imposed everywhere),
such as France and Serbia, would eventually be included more loosely in a
German-dominated European bloc. Poland and the Soviet Union, on the other hand,
were to be a colonial area for German settlement and economic exploitation.

Without regard to these
distinctions, the
SS, the elite corps of the
Nazi Party, possessed exceptional
powers throughout German-dominated Europe and in the course of time came to
perform more and more executive functions, even in those countries under
military administration. Similarly, the powers that Hitler gave to his chief
labour commissioner,
Fritz Sauckel, for the compulsory
enrollment of foreign workers into the German armaments industry were soon
applied to the whole of German-dominated Europe and ultimately turned 7,500,000
people into forced or
slave labourers. Above all, however,
there was the
Final Solution of the "Jewish
question" as ordered by Hitler, which meant the physical
extermination of the Jewish people
throughout Europe wherever German rule was in force or where German influence
was decisive.

The Final Solution--that
is to say the step beyond half-measures such as the concentration of Poland's
Jews into overcrowded ghettoes--was introduced concurrently with Germany's
preparations for the military campaign against the Soviet Union, since Hitler
believed that the annihilation of the Communists entailed not only the
extermination of the Soviet ruling class but also what he believed to be its
"biological basis"--the millions of Jews in western Russia and the Ukraine.
Accordingly, with the start of the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, special
mobile killing squads began systematically shooting the Jewish population on
conquered Soviet territory in the rear of the advancing German armies; in a few
months, up to the end of 1941, they had killed about 1,400,000 people.
Meanwhile, plans were made in 1941 to similarly exterminate the Jews of central
and western Europe. At the Wannsee Conference of Nazi and SS chiefs in January
1942, it was agreed that those Jews would be deported and sent to camps in
eastern Poland where they would be killed en masse or made to work as slave
labourers until they perished. In the period from May 1942 to September 1944
more than 4,200,000 Jews were killed in such death camps as Auschwitz (Oswiecim),
Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, and Sobibor. About 5,700,000 Jews
died in the course of the Final Solution.

While Hitler destined the
Jews in his empire to physical extermination, he regarded the Slavs, principally
the Poles and the Russians, as "subhumans" who were to be subjected to continual
decimation and used as a pool of cheap labour, that is to say, reduced to
slavery. Poland became the training ground for this purpose. Upon the German
conquest of Poland in 1939, Hitler ordered the SS to kill a large proportion of
the Polish intelligentsia. A reign of terror against the nationalistic-minded
Polish ruling classes began, and by the war's end a total of 3,000,000 Poles (in
addition to 3,000,000 Polish Jews) had been killed. Hitler further willed that
the whole mass of Slavs and Balts in the occupied portions of the Soviet Union
should be indiscriminately subjected to German domination and should be
economically exploited without hindrance or compassion. In the event, the
Ukraine was the major area subject to
economic exploitation and also became the main source of slave labour. When the
German armies first entered the Ukraine in July 1941, many Ukrainians had
welcomed the Germans as their liberators from Stalinist terror and
collectivization. But this goodwill soon turned to resentment as the Germans
requisitioned large quantities of grain from the farms, forcibly deported
several million Ukrainians for work in Germany, and engaged in brutal reprisals
against civilians for acts of resistance or sabotage.

These inhumane occupation
policies were practiced to a greater or lesser extent in all the countries
occupied by the Germans, and the result was the beginning in 1940-41 of armed,
underground resistance movements in those countries. Underground resistance was
especially effective in the Soviet Union because it functioned behind fronts on
which the German armies were still engaged in battle with the Red Army. The
Soviet Partisans, as they were called, could thus covertly receive arms,
equipment, and direction from the Soviet forces at the front itself. Soviet
Partisans, like the members of other nations' Resistance movements, harassed and
disrupted German military and economic activities by blowing up ammunition dumps
and communications and transport facilities, sabotaging factories, ambushing
small German units, and gathering military intelligence for use by the Allied
armies. By 1944 the Resistance organizations in the Soviet Union, Poland,
Yugoslavia, France, and Greece had grown quite large and were holding down many
German divisions that were badly needed at the battlefront. In eastern Europe
and Yugoslavia, the Resistance came to control large tracts of land in more
inaccessible areas such as forests, mountain ranges, and swamplands. Some
Resistance organizations, such as the Partisans in Yugoslavia and the National
Liberation Movement in Greece, were Communist ones, while others, such as the
Maquis in France and the Home Army in Poland, comprised people of many different
political persuasions, though they were invariably anti-Fascists.

The German occupation
authorities' attempts to eradicate the Resistance in most cases merely fanned
the flames, due to the Germans' use of indiscriminate reprisals against
civilians. It is generally agreed that by 1944 the Germans had earned the
overwhelming antipathy of most of the people in the occupied nations of Europe.
It should be noted, however, that the German occupation was in general far
harsher in eastern Europe and the Balkans than in western Europe. In the Soviet
Union, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Greece, a process of Resistance guerrilla warfare
and Nazi reprisals began in 1941 and rose to a crescendo in 1943-44 as the fury
of Nazi racism resulted in a war of annihilation upon the Slavic peoples.

To decide what should be
done after victory in North Africa, Roosevelt and Churchill, with their
advisers, met at Casablanca in mid-January 1943. After long argument, it was
eventually agreed that
Sicily should be the next Axis area
to be taken, in July. For the war against Japan, it was decided that two
offensive operations should be undertaken: MacArthur should move toward the
Japanese base at Rabaul, on the island of New Britain; and convergent movements
on Burma should be made by the British from the mainland of India and by the
Americans from the sea. Politically, the Casablanca Conference owes its
importance to the fact that, at its end, Roosevelt publicly announced a demand
for the unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy, and Japan.

Only four months after
Casablanca it became necessary to hold another Anglo-U.S. conference. In mid-May
1943, Roosevelt, Churchill, and their advisers met, in Washington, D.C., for the
conference code-named
Trident. There the Sicilian project
was effectively confirmed, and the date May 1, 1944, was
prescribed--definitively in the U.S view, provisionally in the British--for the
landing of 29 divisions in France; but the question whether the conquest of
Sicily should be followed, as the British proposed, by an invasion of Italy was
left unsettled.

The Eastern Front, February-September 1943

The German
counteroffensive of February 1943 threw back the Soviet forces that had been
advancing toward the Dnepr River on the Izyum sector of the front, and by
mid-March the Germans had retaken Kharkov and Belgorod and reestablished a front
on the Donets River. Hitler also authorized the German forces to fall back, in
March, from their advanced positions facing Moscow to a straighter line in front
of Smolensk and Orël. Finally, there was the existence of the large Soviet
bulge, or salient, around Kursk, between Orël and Belgorod, which extended for
about 150 miles from north to south and protruded 100 miles into the German
lines. This salient irresistibly tempted Hitler and Zeitzler into undertaking a
new and extremely ambitious offensive instead of remaining content to hold their
newly shortened front.

Hitler concentrated all
efforts on this offensive without regard to the risk that an unsuccessful attack
would leave him without reserves to maintain any subsequent defense of his long
front. The Germans' increasing difficulty in building up their forces with fresh
drafts of men and equipment was reflected in the increased delay that year in
opening the summer offensive. Three months' pause followed the close of the
winter campaign.

By contrast, the Red Army
had improved much since 1942, both in quality and in quantity. The flow of new
equipment had greatly increased, as had the number of new divisions, and its
numerical superiority over the Germans was now about 4 to 1. Better still, its
leadership had improved with experience: generals and junior commanders alike
had become more skilled tacticians. That could already be discerned in the
summer of 1943, when the Soviets waited to let the Germans lead off and commit
themselves deeply to an offensive, and so stood well-poised to exploit the
Germans' loss of balance in lunging.

The German offensive
against the
Kursk salient was launched on July 5,
1943, and into it Hitler threw 20 infantry divisions and 17 armoured divisions
having a total of about 3,000 tanks. But the German tank columns got entangled
in the deep minefields that the Soviets had laid, forewarned by the long
preparation of the offensive. The Germans advanced only 10-30 miles, and no
large bag of Soviet prisoners was taken, since the Red Army had withdrawn their
main forces from the salient before the German attack began. After a week of
effort the German armoured divisions were seriously reduced by the well-prepared
Soviet antitank defenses in the salient. On July 12, as the Germans began to
pull out, the Soviets launched a counteroffensive upon the German positions in
the salient and met with great success, taking Orël on August 5. By this time
the Germans had lost 2,900 tanks and 70,000 men in the Battle of Kursk, which
was the largest tank battle in history. The Soviets continued to advance
steadily, taking Belgorod and then Kharkov. In September the Soviet advance was
accelerated, and by the end of the month the Germans in the Ukraine had been
driven back to the Dnepr.

The Southwest and South Pacific, June-October 1943

A Pacific military
conference held in Washington, D.C., in March 1943 produced a new schedule of
operations calling for the development of some counterattacks against the
Japanese. The reduction of the threat from the large Japanese naval base at
Rabaul, by encirclement if not by the capture of that stronghold, was a primary
objective for MacArthur.

Between June 22 and June
30, 1943, two U.S. regiments invaded Woodlark and Kiriwina islands (northeast of
the tip of Papua), whence aircraft could range over not only the Coral Sea but
also the approaches to Rabaul and to the
Solomons. At the same time, U.S. and
Australian units advanced from Buna along the coast of New Guinea toward Lae and
Salamaua, while other Australian forces simultaneously advanced from Wau in the
hinterland; and in the night of June 29-30, U.S. forces secured Nassau Bay as a
base for further advances against the same positions.

U.S. landings on
New Georgia and on Rendova in the
Solomons, however, also made in the night of June 29-30, provoked the Japanese
into strong counteraction: between July 5 and July 16, in the battles of
Kula Gulf and of
Kolombangara, the Allies lost one
cruiser and two destroyers and had three more cruisers crippled; and the
Japanese, though they lost a cruiser and two destroyers, were able to land
considerable reinforcements (from New Britain). Only substantial
counter-reinforcement secured the New Georgia group of islands for the Allies,
who, moreover, began on August 15 to extend their operation to the island of
Vella Lavella also. In the last two months of the struggle, which ended with the
Japanese evacuation of Vella Lavella on October 7, the Japanese sank an Allied
destroyer and crippled two more but lost a further six of their own; and their
attempt to defend the Solomon Islands cost them 10,000 lives, as against the
Americans' 1,150 killed and 4,100 wounded.

Meanwhile, U.S. planes on
August 17-18 had attacked Japanese bases at Wewak (on the New Guinea coast far
to the west of Lae) and destroyed more than 200 aircraft there. On September 4
an Australian division landed near Lae, and the next day U.S. paratroops dropped
at Nadzab, above Lae on the Markham River, where they were soon joined by an
Australian airborne division. Salamaua fell to the Allies on September 12, Lae
on September 16, and Finschhafen, on the Huon Peninsula behind Lae, on October
2. On Sept. 30, 1943, the Japanese made a new policy decision: a last defense
line was to be established from western New Guinea and the Carolines to the
Marianas by spring 1944, to be held at all costs, and also to be used as a base
for counterattacks.

The Allied landings in Europe and the defeat of the Axis powers

Developments from autumn 1943 to summer 1944

World War
II: German and Allied
movements in Europe from the end of 1942 to 1945, and (inset) the Normandy...

Hitler's greatest
strategic disadvantage in opposing the Allies' imminent reentry into Europe lay
in the immense stretch of Germany's conquests; from the west coast of France to
the east coast of Greece. It was difficult for him to gauge where the Allies
would strike next. The Allies' greatest strategic advantage lay in the wide
choice of alternative objectives and in the powers of distraction they enjoyed
through their superior sea power. Hitler, while always having to guard against a
cross-Channel invasion from England's shores, had cause to fear that the
Anglo-American armies in North Africa might land anywhere on his southern front
between Spain and Greece.

Having failed to save its
forces in Tunisia, the Axis had only 10 Italian divisions of various sorts and
two German panzer units stationed on the island of
Sicily at midsummer 1943. The Allies,
meanwhile, were preparing to throw some 478,000 men into the island--150,000 of
them in the first three days of the invasion. Under the supreme command of
Alexander, Montgomery's British 8th Army and Patton's U.S. 7th Army were to be
landed on two stretches of beach 40 miles long, 20 miles distant from one
another, the British in the southeast of the island, the Americans in the south.
The Allies' air superiority in the Mediterranean theatre was so great by this
time--more than 4,000 aircraft against some 1,500 German and Italian ones--that
the Axis bombers had been withdrawn from Sicily in June to bases in
north-central Italy.

On July 10 Allied seaborne
troops landed on Sicily. The coastal defenses, manned largely by
Sicilians unwilling to turn their
homeland into a battlefield for the Germans' sake, collapsed rapidly enough. The
British forces had cleared the whole southeastern part of the island in the
first three days of the invasion. The Allies' drive toward Messina then took the
form of a circuitous movement by the British around Mount Etna in combination
with an eastward drive by the Americans, who took Palermo, on the western half
of the northern coast, on July 22. Meanwhile, the German armoured strength in
Sicily had been reinforced.

After the successive
disasters sustained by the Axis in Africa, many of the Italian leaders were
desperately anxious to make peace with the Allies. The invasion of Sicily,
representing an immediate threat to the Italian mainland, prompted them to
action. On the night of July 24-25, 1943, when Mussolini revealed to the Fascist
Grand Council that the Germans were thinking of evacuating the southern half of
Italy, the majority of the council voted for a resolution against him, and he
resigned his powers. On July 25 the king,
Victor Emmanuel III, ordered the
arrest of Mussolini and entrusted Marshal
Pietro Badoglio with the formation of
a new government. The new government entered into secret negotiations with the
Allies, despite the presence of sizable German forces in Italy.

A few days after the fall
of Mussolini, Field Marshal
Albert Kesselring, the German
commander in chief in Italy, decided that the Axis troops in Sicily must be
evacuated; the local Italian commander thought so too. While rearguard actions
held up the Allies at Adrano (on the western face of Mount Etna) and at Randazzo
(to the north), 40,000 Germans and 60,000 Italian troops were safely withdrawn
across the Strait of Messina to the mainland, mostly in the week ending on Aug.
16, 1943--the day before the Allies' entry into Messina.

The Allies sustained about
22,800 casualties in their conquest of Sicily. The Axis powers suffered about
165,000 casualties, of whom 30,000 were Germans.

The success of the
Sicilian operation and the fall of Mussolini converted the American military and
political leadership into supporters of a campaign in Italy. Furthermore,
Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Morgan, who after Casablanca had been
designated chief of staff to the Supreme Allied Commander (COSSAC), produced a
detailed and realistic plan for the long-envisaged invasion of France from Great
Britain, thus enabling the U.S. strategists to calculate more precisely how much
of the Allies' resources were needed for that purpose and how much could be
spared for operations in the Mediterranean and for the Pacific. With regard to
the Pacific, plans sponsored by Admiral Nimitz for operations against the
Gilbert and Marshall islands apart from the enterprise against Rabaul were
approved early in August 1943.

The new turn of
strategical thought necessitated a new Anglo-U.S. conference, which took place
in
Quebec in mid-August 1943 and was
code-named "Quadrant." After vigorous debate, the question of the timing of
"Overlord" was eventually left open, but it was agreed that the strength of the
assault force should exceed the original estimate by 25 percent, that the
cross-Channel landing should be supported by a
landing in southern France, and that
a U.S. officer should be in command of "Overlord." It was also decided that a
new Southeast Asia theatre of war should be organized, under British command.

From Sicily, the Allies
had a wide choice of directions for their next offensive.
Calabria, the "toe" of Italy, was the
nearest and most obvious possible destination, and the "shin" was also
vulnerable; and the "heel" was also very attractive. The two army corps of
Montgomery's 8th Army crossed the Strait of Messina and landed on the "toe" of
Italy on Sept. 3, 1943; but, though the initial resistance was practically
negligible, they made only very slow progress, as the terrain, with only two
good roads running up the coasts of the great Calabrian "toe" prevented the
deployment of large forces. On the day of the landing, however, the Italian
government at last agreed to the Allies' secret terms for a capitulation. It was
understood that Italy would be treated with leniency in direct proportion to the
part that it would take, as soon as possible, in the war against Germany. The
capitulation was announced on September 8.

The landing on the "shin"
of Italy, at
Salerno, just south of
Naples, was begun on September 9, by
the mixed U.S.-British 5th Army, under General Mark Clark. Transported by 700
ships, 55,000 men made the initial assault, and 115,000 more followed up. At
first they were faced only by the German 16th Panzer Division; but Kesselring,
though he had only eight weak divisions to defend all southern and central
Italy, had had time to plan since the fall of Mussolini and had been expecting a
blow at the "shin." His counterstroke made the success of the Salerno landing
precarious for six days, and it was not until October 1 that the 5th Army
entered Naples.

By contrast, the much
smaller landing on the "heel" of Italy, which had been made on September 2 (the
day preceding the invasion of the "toe"), took the Germans by surprise.
Notwithstanding the paucity of its strength in men and in equipment, the
expedition captured two good ports, Taranto and Brindisi, in a very short time;
but it lacked the resources to advance promptly. Nearly a fortnight passed
before another small force was landed at Bari, the next considerable port north
of Brindisi, to push thence unopposed into
Foggia.

It was the threat to their
rear from the "heel" of Italy and from Foggia that had induced the Germans to
fall back from their positions defending Naples against the 5th Army. When the
Italian government, in pursuance of a Badoglio-Eisenhower agreement of September
29, declared war against Germany on Oct. 13, 1943, Kesselring was already
receiving reinforcements and consolidating the German hold on central and
northern Italy. The 5th Army was checked temporarily on the Volturno River, only
20 miles north of Naples, then more lastingly on the Garigliano River, while the
8th Army, having made its way from Calabria up the Adriatic coast, was likewise
held on the Sangro River. Autumn and midwinter passed without the Allies' making
any notable impression on the Germans'
Gustav Line, which ran for 100 miles
from the mouth of the Garigliano through Cassino and over the Apennines to the
mouth of the Sangro.

The western Allies and Stalin: Cairo and Tehran, 1943

Relations between the
western Allies and the U.S.S.R. were still delicate. Besides their inability to
satisfy Soviet demands for convoys of supplies and for an early invasion of
France, the Americans and the British were embarrassed by the discrepancy
between their political war aims and Stalin's.

The longest-standing
difference was about Poland. While Poles were still fighting on the Allies' side
and acknowledging the authority of General Wladyslaw
Sikorski's London-based Polish
government in exile, Stalin was trying to get the Allies to consent to the
U.S.S.R.'s retention, after the war, of all the territory taken from Poland by
virtue of the German-Soviet pacts of 1939. On Jan. 16, 1943, the Soviet
government announced that Poles from the border territories in dispute were
being treated as Soviet citizens and drafted into the Red Army. On April 25, the
Soviet government severed relations with the London Poles, and Moscow
subsequently began to build up its own puppet government for postwar Poland.

Besides the quarrel over
Poland, the western Allies and the U.S.S.R. were also at variance with regard to
the postwar fate of other European states still under German domination; but the
Americans and the British were really more interested in maintaining the Soviet
war effort against Germany than in insisting, at the risk of offense to Stalin,
on the detailed application of their own loudly but vaguely enunciated war aims.

Sextant, the conference of
Nov. 22-27, 1943, for which Churchill, Roosevelt, and Chiang Kai-shek met in
Cairo, was, on Roosevelt's
insistence, devoted mainly to discussing plans for a British-U.S.-Chinese
operation in northern Burma. Little was produced by Sextant except the
Cairo Declaration, published on
December 1, a further statement of war aims. It prescribed inter alia that Japan
was to surrender all Pacific islands acquired since 1914, to retrocede
Manchuria, Formosa, and the Pescadores to China, and to give up all other
territory "taken by violence and greed"; and, in addition, it was stipulated
that Korea was in due course to become independent.

From Cairo, Roosevelt and
Churchill went to
Tehran, to meet Stalin at the Eureka
conference of November 28-December 1. Stalin renewed the Soviet promise of
military intervention against Japan, but he primarily wanted an assurance that
"Overlord" (the invasion of France) would indeed take place in 1944. Reassured
about this by Roosevelt, he declared that the Red Army would attack
simultaneously on the Eastern Front. On the political plane, Stalin now demanded
the Baltic coast of East Prussia for the U.S.S.R. as well as the territories
annexed in 1939-40. The main communique of the conference was accompanied by a
joint declaration guaranteeing the postwar restoration of Iran. Returning to
Cairo, Roosevelt and Churchill spent six more days, December 2-7, in staff talks
to compose their differences on strategy. They finally agreed that "Overlord"
(with Eisenhower in command) should have first claim on resources.

German strategy, from 1943

World War
II: German and Allied
movements in Europe from the end of 1942 to 1945, and (inset) the Normandy...

From late 1942 German
strategy, every feature of which was determined by Hitler, was solely aimed at
protecting the still very large area under German control--most of Europe and
part of North Africa--against a future Soviet onslaught on the Eastern Front and
against future Anglo-U.S. offensives on the southern and western fronts. The
Germans' vague hopes that the Allies would shrink from such costly tasks or that
the "unnatural" coalition of western capitalism and Soviet Communism would break
up before achieving victory were disappointed; and so Hitler, in accordance with
his dictum that "Germany shall either be a world power or not be at all,"
consciously resolved to preside over the downfall of the German nation. He gave
inflexible orders whereby whole armies were made to stand their ground in
tactically hopeless positions and were forbidden to surrender under any
circumstances. The initial success of this strategy in preventing a German rout
during the Soviet winter counteroffensive of 1941-42 had blinded Hitler to its
impracticability in the very different military circumstances on the Eastern
Front by 1943, by which time the Germans simply lacked sufficient numbers of
troops to defend an extremely long front against much more numerous Soviet
forces. (By December 1943 the 3,000,000 German troops there were opposed by
about 5,500,000 Soviet troops.)

The strategy of keeping
his armies stationary was made easier for Hitler by the complete ascendancy he
had achieved over his generals, who disputed with Hitler only at the risk of
losing their commands or worse. Frequent changes were made in the command of the
various army groups and armies, with the result that during 1943-44 most of the
talented commanders who had been associated with Germany's past successes were
removed, and everyone who was suspected of a critical attitude at headquarters
was silenced.

From late 1943 on,
Hitler's strategy, which from a political standpoint remains inexplicable to
most Western historians, was to strengthen the German forces in western Europe
at the expense of those on the Eastern Front. In view of the danger of the great
Anglo-U.S. invasion of western Europe that seemed imminent by early 1944, the
loss of some part of his eastern conquests evidently seemed to Hitler to be less
serious. Hitler continued to insist on the primacy of the war in the west after
the start of the Allied invasion of northern France in June 1944, and while his
armies made strenuous efforts to contain the Allied bridgehead in Normandy for
the next two months, Hitler accepted the annihilation of the German Army Group
Centre on the Eastern Front by the Soviet summer offensive (from June 1944),
which brought the Red Army in a few weeks' time to the Vistula River and the
borders of East Prussia. But the Western Front likewise crumbled in a few weeks,
whereupon the Allies advanced to Germany's western borders. Then, still adhering
to his guiding principle, Hitler assembled on the Western Front all that was
left of his forces there and tried to drive the British and Americans back in
what became known as the
Battle of the Bulge. This campaign
had some successes but meant that Germany's last battle worthy units were used
on the Western Front while the Red Army, heavily outnumbering the remaining
German troops in the east, resumed its drive on the eastern frontiers of Germany
and reached the Oder River by the end of January 1945.

The Eastern Front, October 1943-April 1944

World War
II: German and Allied
movements in Europe from the end of 1942 to 1945, and (inset) the Normandy...

By the end of the
first week of October 1943, the Red Army had established several bridgeheads on
the right bank of the Dnepr River. Then, while General N.F.
Vatutin's drive against Kiev was
engaging the Germans' attention, General
Ivan Stepanovich Konev suddenly pushed
so far forward from the Kremenchug bridgehead (more than halfway downstream
between Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk) that the German forces within the great bend of
the Dnepr to the south would have been isolated if Manstein had not stemmed the
Soviet advance just in time to extricate them. By early November the Red Army
had reached the mouth of the Dnepr also, and the Germans in the Crimea were
isolated. Kiev, too, fell to Vatutin on November 6, Zhitomir, 80 miles to the
west, and Korosten, north of Zhitomir, in the next 12 days. Farther north,
however, the Germans, who had already fallen back from Smolensk to a line
covering the upper Dnepr, repelled with little difficulty five rather
predictable Soviet thrusts toward Minsk in the last quarter of 1943.

Vatutin's forces from the
Zhitomir-Korosten sector advanced westward across the prewar Polish frontier on
Jan. 4, 1944; and, though another German flank attack, by troops drawn from
adjacent fronts, slowed them down, they had reached Lutsk, 100 miles farther
west, a month later. Vatutin's left wing, meanwhile, wheeled southward to
converge with Konev's right, so that 10 German divisions were encircled near
Korsun, on the Dnepr line south of Kiev. Vainly trying to save those 10
divisions, the Germans had to abandon Nikopol, in the Dnepr bend far to the
south, with its valuable manganese mines.

March 1944 saw a triple
thrust by the Red Army:
Zhukov, succeeding to Vatutin's
command, drove southwest toward Tarnopol, to outflank the Germans on the upper
stretches of the southern Bug River. General
Rodion Yakovlevich Malinovsky, in the
south, advanced across the mouth of the latter river from that of the Dnepr; and
between them Konev, striking over the central stretch of the Bug, reached the
Dnestr, 70 miles ahead, and succeeded in crossing it. When Zhukov had crossed
the upper Prut River and Konev was threatening Iasi on the Moldavian
stretch of the river, the Carpathian Mountains were the only natural barrier
remaining between the Red Army and the Hungarian Plain. German troops occupied
Hungary on March 20, since Hitler
suspected that the Hungarian regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, might not resist the
Red Army to the utmost.

A German counterstroke
from the Lwów area of southern Poland against Zhukov's extended flank early in
April not only put an end to the latter's overhasty pressure on the Tatar (Yablonitsky)
Pass through the Carpathians but also made possible the withdrawal of some of
the German forces endangered by the Red Army's March operation. Konev, too, was
halted in front of Iasi; but his left swung southward down the Dnestr to
converge with Malinovsky's drive on Odessa. That great port fell to the Red Army
on April 10. On May 9 the Germans in the Crimea abandoned Sevastopol, caught as
they were between Soviet pincers from the mainland north of the isthmus and from
the east across the Strait of Kerch.

At the northern end of the
Eastern Front, a Soviet offensive in January 1944 had been followed by an
orderly German retreat from the fringes of the long-besieged Leningrad area to a
shorter line exploiting the great lakes farther to the south. The retreat was
beneficial to the Germans but sacrificed their land link with the
Finns, who now found themselves no
better off than they had been in 1939-40. Finland in February 1944 sought an
armistice from the U.S.S.R., but the latter's terms proved unacceptable.

The war in the Pacific, October 1943-August 1944

Considering that it might
be necessary for them to invade Japan proper, the Allies drew up new plans in
mid-1943. The main offensive, it was decided, should be from the south and from
the southeast, through the
Philippines and through
Micronesia (rather than from the
Aleutians in the North Pacific or from the Asian mainland). While occupation of
the Philippines would disrupt Japanese communications with the East Indian isles
west of New Guinea and with Malaya, the conquest of Micronesia, from the
Gilberts by way of the Marshalls and Carolines to the Marianas, would not only
offer the possibility of drawing the Japanese into a naval showdown but also win
bases for heavy air raids on the Japanese mainland prior to invasion.

For the approach to the
Philippines, it was prerequisite, on the one hand, to complete the encirclement
of
Rabaul, thereby nullifying the threat
from the Japanese positions in the Solomon Islands and in the Bismarck
Archipelago (New
Britain, New Ireland, etc.) and, on the other, to reduce the Japanese
hold on western New Guinea. Great emphasis, however, was put on the advance
across the central Pacific through Micronesia, to be begun via the Gilberts.

The encirclement of Rabaul

Allied moves to isolate
the large Japanese garrison on Rabaul proceeded by land and air. The
encirclement of Rabaul by land began during October and November 1943 with the
capture by New Zealand troops of the Treasury Islands in the Solomons and was
accompanied on November 1 by a U.S. landing at Empress Augusta Bay on the west
of
Bougainville. U.S. reinforcements
subsequently repulsed Japanese counterattacks in December, when they sank two
destroyers, and in March 1944, when they killed almost 6,000 men. What remained
of the Japanese garrison on Bougainville was no longer capable of fighting,
though it did not surrender until the end of the war.

Continuing the approach to
Rabaul, U.S. troops landed on December 15 at Arawe on the southwestern coast of
New Britain, thereby distracting Japanese attention from Cape Gloucester, on the
northwestern coast, where a major landing was made on December 26. By Jan. 16,
1944, the airstrip at Cape Gloucester had been captured and defense lines set
up. Talasea, halfway to Rabaul, fell in March 1944. The conquest of western New
Britain secured Allied control of the Vitiaz and Dampier straits between that
island and New Guinea.

By constructing air bases
on each island that they captured, the Allies systematically blocked any
westward movement that the Japanese might have made: New Zealand troops took the
Green Islands southeast of New Guinea on February 15; and U.S. forces invaded
Los Negros in the Admiralty Islands on February 29 and captured Manus on March
9.

With the fall of the
Emirau Islands on March 20, the Allies' stranglehold on Rabaul and Kavieng was
practically complete, so that they could thenceforth disregard the 100,000
Japanese immobilized there.

Western New Guinea

Before they could push
northward to the Philippines, the Allies had to subdue Japanese-held western New
Guinea. U.S. troops took Saidor, on the Huon Peninsula, on Jan. 2, 1944, and
established an air base there; and the Australians took Sio, to the east of
Saidor, on January 16. Then reinforcements were landed at Mindiri, west of
Saidor, on March 5, and Australian infantry began to move westward up the coast,
to take Bogadjim, Madang, and Alexishafen.

Bypassing Hansa Bay (which
was eventually captured on June 15) and
Wewak, whither the Japanese had
retreated, the Allies, on April 22, 1944, made two simultaneous landings at
Hollandia: having in the past weeks
already destroyed 300 Japanese planes, they captured the airfields there in four
days' time. In the following months Hollandia was converted into a major base
and command post for the Southwest Pacific area. The Allies also took Aitape, on
the coast east of Hollandia, and held it against counterattacks by more than
200,000 Wewak-based Japanese during July and August.
Biak, the isle guarding the entrance
to Geelvink Bay, west of Hollandia, was invaded by U.S. troops on May 27, 1944;
but the Japanese defense of it was maintained until early August. Though
westernmost New Guinea fell likewise to the Allies in August 1944, the Japanese
garrison at Wewak held out until May 10, 1945.

The central Pacific

Though the U.S. Joint
Chiefs of Staff envisaged no major offensive westward across the Pacific toward
Formosa until mid-1944, they nevertheless decided to launch a limited offensive
in the central Pacific in 1943, hoping thereby both to speed the pace of the war
and to draw the Japanese away from other areas. Accordingly, Nimitz' central
Pacific forces invaded the Gilberts on Nov. 23, 1943. Makin fell easily, but
well-fortified Japanese defenses on
Tarawa cost the U.S. Marines 1,000
killed and 2,300 wounded. Japanese losses in the Gilberts totaled about 8,500
men.

Having been forced to cede
the Gilberts, the Japanese elected next to defend the
Marshalls, in order both to absorb
Allied forces and to strain the latters' extended lines of supply. Nimitz
subjected
Kwajalein Atoll, which he chose first
to attack, to so heavy a preliminary bombardment that the U.S. infantry could
land on it on Jan. 31, 1944; and U.S. forces moved on to Enewetak on February
17.

In support of the landings
on the Marshalls, the U.S. fleet on Feb. 17, 1944, started a series of day and
night attacks against the Japanese base at
Truk in the
Caroline Islands, where they
destroyed some 300 aircraft and 200,000 tons of merchant shipping. Henceforth,
the Allies could confidently ignore Truk and bypass it.

The Allies' next
objective, for which they required more than 500 ships and 125,000 troops, was
to reduce the
Mariana Islands, lying 1,000 miles
from Enewetak and 3,500 miles from Pearl Harbor. Against this threat, after the
destruction at Truk, the Japanese hastily drew up a new defense plan, "Operation
A," relying on their remaining 1,055 land-based aircraft in the Marianas, in the
Carolines, and in western New Guinea and on timely and decisive intervention by
a sea force, which should include nine aircraft carriers with 450 aircraft. But
in the spring of 1944 the Japanese air strength was still further depleted, and,
moreover, on March 31 the sponsor of the plan, Admiral Koga Mineichi (Yamamoto's
successor), and his staff were killed in an air disaster. When, on June 15, two
U.S. Marine divisions went ashore on
Saipan Island in the Marianas, the
30,000 Japanese defenders put up so fierce a resistance that an army division
was needed to reinforce the Marines. Using the same defensive tactics as on
other small islands, the Japanese had fortified themselves in underground caves
and bunkers that afforded protection from American artillery and naval
bombardment. Notwithstanding this, the Japanese defenders were gradually
compressed into smaller and smaller pockets, and they themselves ended most
organized resistance with a suicidal counterattack on July 7, the largest of its
kind during the war.

The loss of Saipan was
such a disaster for Japan that when the news was announced in Tokyo the prime
minister,
Tojo
Hideki, and his entire Cabinet resigned. To realists in the Japanese
high command, the loss of the Marianas spelled the ultimate loss of the war, but
no one dared say so. Tojo's Cabinet was succeeded by that of
General
Koiso Kuniaki, which was pledged to
carrying on the fight with renewed vigour.

Air power enthusiasts have
called the conquest of Saipan "the turning point of the war in the Pacific," for
it enabled the United States to establish air bases there for the big
B-29 bombers, which had been
developed for the specific purpose of bombing Japan. The first flight of 100
B-29s took off from Saipan on Nov. 24, 1944, and bombed Tokyo, the first bombing
raid on the Japanese capital since 1942.

While the Japanese were
still resisting on Saipan, the Japanese Combined Fleet, under Admiral
Ozawa Jisaburo,
was approaching from Philippine and East Indian anchorages, in accordance with
"Operation A," to challenge the U.S. 5th Fleet, under Admiral
Raymond Spruance. Ozawa, with only
nine aircraft carriers against 15 for the United States, was obviously inferior
in naval power, but he counted heavily on help from land-based aircraft on Guam,
Rota, and Yap. The encounter, which took place west of the Marianas and is known
as the
Battle of the Philippine Sea, has
been called the greatest carrier battle of the war. It began on June 19 when
Ozawa sent 430 planes in four waves against Spruance's ships. The result was a
disaster for the Japanese. U.S. airmen shot down more than 300 planes and sank
two carriers, and as the Japanese fleet retreated northward toward Okinawa it
lost another carrier and almost 100 more planes. The United States lost about
130 planes. The hasty and incomplete training of the Japanese pilots and the
inadequate armour plating of their planes were decisive factors in the numerous
aerial combats of this battle, which was ultimately of more strategic importance
than the fall of Saipan. Nimitz' forces could thereafter occupy other major
islands in the Marianas: Guam on July 21 and Tinian on July 24. The Marianas
cost the Japanese 46,000 killed or captured, the Americans only 4,750 killed.

The Burmese frontier and China, November 1943-summer 1944

For the dry season of
1943-44 both the Japanese and the Allies were resolved on offensives in
Southeast Asia. On the Japanese side, Lieutenant General Kawabe Masakazu planned
a major Japanese advance across the Chindwin River, on the central front, in
order to occupy the plain of Imphal and to establish a firm defensive line in
eastern Assam. The Allies, for their part, planned a number of thrusts into
Burma: Stilwell's NCAC forces, including his three Chinese divisions and
"Merrill's Marauders" (U.S. troops trained by
Wingate on Chindit lines), were to
advance against Mogaung and
Myitkyina; while
Slim's 14th Army was to launch its XV
Corps southeastward into Arakan and its IV Corps eastward to the Chindwin.
Because the Japanese had habitually got the better of advanced British forces by
outflanking them, Slim formulated a new tactic to ensure that his units would
stand against attack in the forthcoming campaign, even if they should be
isolated: they were to know that, when ordered to stand, they could certainly
count both on supplies from the air and on his use of reserve troops to turn the
situation against the Japanese attackers.

On the southern wing of
the Burmese front, the XV Corps's Arakan operation, launched in November 1943,
had achieved most of its objectives by the end of January 1944. When the
Japanese counterattack surrounded one Indian division and part of another,
Slim's new tactic was brought into play, and the Japanese found themselves
crushed between the encircled Indians and the relieving forces.

The Japanese crossing of
the Chindwin into Assam, on the central Burmese front, when the fighting in
Arakan was dying down, played into Slim's hands, since he could now profit from
the Allies' superiority in aircraft and in tanks. The Japanese were able to
approach Imphal and to surround Kohima, but the British forces protecting these
towns were reinforced with several Indian divisions that were taken from the
now-secure Arakan front. With air support, Slim's reinforced forces now defended
Imphal against multiple Japanese thrusts and outflanking movements until, in
mid-May 1944, he was able to launch two of his divisions into an offensive
eastward, while still containing the last bold effort of the Japanese to capture
Imphal. By June 22 the 14th Army had averted the Japanese menace to Assam and
won the initiative for its own advance into Burma. The Battle of Imphal-Kohima
cost the British and Indian forces 17,587 casualties (12,600 of them sustained
at Imphal), the Japanese forces 30,500 dead (including 8,400 from disease) and
30,000 wounded.

On the northern Burmese
front, Stilwell's forces were already approaching Mogaung and Myitkyina before
the southern crisis of Imphal-Kohima; and the subsidiary Chindit operation
against Indaw was going well ahead when, on March 24, 1944, Wingate himself was
killed in an air crash. Meanwhile, Chiang Kai-shek was constrained by U.S.
threats of a suspension of lend-lease to finally authorize some action by the 12
divisions of his Yunnan Army, which on May 12, 1944, with air support, began to
cross the Salween River westward in the direction of Myitkyina, Bhamo, and
Lashio. Myitkyina airfield was taken by Stilwell's forces, with "Merrill's
Marauders," on May 17, Mogaung was taken by the Chindits on June 26, and finally
Myitkyina itself was taken by Stilwell's Chinese divisions on August 3. All of
northwest and much of northern Burma was now in Allied hands.

In China proper, a
Japanese attack toward Ch'ang-sha, begun on May 27, won control not only of a
further stretch of the north-south axis of the Peking-Han-K'ou railroad but also
of several of the airfields from which the Americans had been bombing the
Japanese in China and were intending to bomb them in Japan.

World War
II: German and Allied
movements in Europe from the end of 1942 to 1945, and (inset) the Normandy...

The Allies' northward
advance up the Italian peninsula to
Rome was still blocked by
Kesselring'sGustav Line, which was hinged on
Monte Cassino. To bypass that line,
the Allies landed some 50,000 seaborne troops, with 5,000 vehicles, at
Anzio, only 33 miles south of Rome, on
Jan. 22, 1944. The landing surprised the Germans and met, at first, with very
little opposition; but, instead of driving on over the Alban Hills to Rome at
once, the force at Anzio spent so much time consolidating its position there
that Kesselring was able, with his reserves, to develop a powerful
counteroffensive against it on February 3. The beachhead was thereby reduced to
a very shallow dimension, while the defenses at Monte Cassino held out
unimpaired against a new assault by Clark's 5th Army.

For a final effort against
the Gustav Line,
Alexander decided to shift most of
the 8th Army, now commanded by Major General Sir
Oliver Leese, from the Adriatic flank
of the peninsula to the west, where it was to strengthen the 5th Army's pressure
around Monte Cassino and on the approaches to the valley of the Liri (headstream
of the Garigliano). The combined attack, which was started in the night of May
11-12, 1944, succeeded in breaching the German defenses at a number of points
between Cassino and the coast. Thanks to this victory, the Americans could push
forward up the coast, while the British entered the valley and outflanked Monte
Cassino, which fell to a Polish corps of the 8th Army on May 18. Five days
later, the Allies' force at Anzio struck out against the investing Germans
(whose strength had been diminished in order to reinforce the Gustav Line); and
by May 26 it had achieved a breakthrough. When the 8th Army's Canadian Corps
penetrated the last German defenses in the Liri Valley, the whole Gustav Line
began to collapse.

Concentrating all
available strength on his left wing, Alexander pressed up from the south to
effect a junction with the troops thrusting northward from Anzio. The Germans in
the Alban Hills could not withstand the massive attack. On June 5, 1944, the
Allies entered Rome. The propaganda value of their occupying the Eternal City,
Mussolini's former capital, was offset, however, by an unforeseen strategical
reality: Kesselring's forces retreated not in the expected rout but gradually,
to the line of the Arno River; Florence, 160 miles north of Rome, did not fall
to the Allies until August 13; and by that time the Germans had made ready yet
another chain of defenses, the Gothic Line, running from the Tyrrhenian coast
midway between Pisa and La Spezia, over the Apennines in a reversed S curve, to
the Adriatic coast between Pesaro and Rimini.

Alexander might have made
more headway against Kesselring's new front if some of his forces had not been
subtracted, in August 1944, for the American-sponsored but eventually
unnecessary invasion of southern France ("Operation Anvil," finally renamed
"Dragoon" [see below]). As it was, the 8th Army, switched back from the west to
the Adriatic coast, achieved only an indecisive breakthrough toward Rimini.
After this September offensive, the autumn rains set in, to make even more
difficult Alexander's indirect movements, against Kesselring's resolute
opposition, toward the mouth of the Po River.

Developments from summer 1944 to autumn 1945

World War
II: German and Allied
movements in Europe from the end of 1942 to 1945, and (inset) the Normandy...

The German Army high
command had long been expecting an Allied invasion of northern France but had no
means of knowing where precisely the stroke would come: while Rundstedt,
commander in chief in the west, thought that the landings would be made between
Calais and Dieppe (at the narrowest width of the Channel between England and
France), Hitler prophetically indicated the central and more westerly stretches
of the coast of Normandy as the site of the attack; and Rommel, who was in
charge of the forces on France's Channel coast, finally came around to Hitler's
opinion. The fortifications of those stretches were consequently improved, but
Rundstedt and Rommel still took different views about the way in which the
invasion should be met: while Rundstedt recommended a massive counterattack on
the invaders after their landing, Rommel, fearing that Allied air supremacy
might interfere fatally with the adequate massing of the German forces for such
a counterattack, advocated instead immediate action on the beaches against any
attempted landing. The Germans had 59 divisions spread over western Europe from
the Low Countries to the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts of France; but
approximately half of this number was static, and the remainder included only 10
armoured or motorized divisions.

Postponed from May, the
western Allies' "Operation Overlord," their long-debated invasion of northern
France, took place on June 6, 1944--the war's most celebrated
D-Day--when 156,000 men were landed
on the beaches of Normandy between the Orne estuary and the southeastern end of
the Cotentin Peninsula: 83,000 British and Canadian troops on the eastern
beaches, 73,000 Americans on the western. Under Eisenhower's supreme direction
and Montgomery's immediate command, the invading forces initially comprised the
Canadian 1st Army (Lieutenant General Henry Duncan Graham Crerar); the British
2nd Army (Lieutenant General Sir Miles Dempsey); and the British 1st and 6th
airborne divisions, the U.S. 1st Army, and the U.S. 82nd and 101st airborne
divisions (all under Lieutenant General
Omar N. Bradley).

By 9:00 AM on D-Day the
coastal defenses were generally breached, but Caen, which had been scheduled to
fall on D-Day and was the hinge of an Allied advance, held out until July 9, the
one panzer division already available there on June 6 having been joined the
next day by a second. Though the heavy fighting at Caen attracted most of the
German reserves, the U.S. forces in the westernmost sector of the front likewise
met a very stubborn resistance. But when they had taken the port of Cherbourg on
June 26 and proceeded to clear the rest of the Cotentin, they could turn
southward to take Saint-Lô on July 18.

The Allies could not have
made such rapid progress in northern France if their air forces had not been
able to interfere decisively with the movement of the German reserves. Allied
aircraft destroyed most of the bridges over the Seine River to the east and over
the Loire to the south. The German reserves thus had to make long detours in
order to reach the Normandy battle zone and were so constantly harassed on the
march by Allied strafing that they suffered endless delays and only arrived in
driblets. And even where reserves could have been brought up, their movement was
sometimes inhibited by hesitation and dissension on the Germans' own side.
Hitler, though he had rightly predicted the zone of the Allies' landings, came
to mistakenly believe, after D-Day, that a second and larger invasion was to be
attempted east of the Seine and so was reluctant to allow reserves to be moved
westward over that river. He also forbade the German forces already engaged in
Normandy to retreat in time to make an orderly withdrawal to new defenses.

Rundstedt, meanwhile, was
slow in obtaining Hitler's authority for the movement of the general reserve's
SS panzer corps from its position north of Paris to the front; and Rommel,
though he made prompt use of the forces at hand, had been absent from his
headquarters on D-Day itself, when a forecast of rough weather had seemed to
make a cross-Channel invasion unlikely. Subsequently,
Rundstedt's urgent plea for
permission to retreat provoked Hitler, on July 3, to appoint
Kluge as commander in chief in the
west in Rundstedt's place; and Rommel was badly hurt on July 17, when his car
crashed under attack from Allied planes.

There was something else,
besides the progress of the Allies, to demoralize the German commanders--the
failure and the aftermath of a
conspiracy against Hitler. Alarmed at
the calamitous course of events and disgusted by the crimes of the Nazi regime,
certain conservative but anti-Nazi civilian dignitaries and military officers
had formed themselves into a secret opposition, with
Karl Friedrich Goerdeler (a former
chief mayor of Leipzig) and Colonel General
Ludwig Beck (a former chief of the
army general staff) among its leaders. From 1943 this opposition canvased the
indispensable support of the active military authorities with some notable
success: General Friedrich Olbricht (chief of the General Army Office) and
several of the serving commanders, including Rommel and Kluge, became implicated
to various extents. Apart from General Henning von Tresckow, however, the
group's most dynamic member was Colonel
Graf Claus von Stauffenberg, who as
chief of staff to the chief of the army reserve from July 1, 1944, had access to
Hitler. Finally, it was decided to kill Hitler and to use the army reserve for a
coup d'état in Berlin, where a new regime under Beck and Goerdeler should be set
up. On July 20, therefore, Stauffenberg left a bomb concealed in a briefcase in
the room where Hitler was conferring at his headquarters in East Prussia. The
bomb duly exploded; but Hitler survived, and the coup in Berlin miscarried. The
Nazi reaction was savage: besides 200 immediately implicated conspirators, 5,000
people who were more remotely linked with the plot or were altogether
unconnected with it were put to death. Kluge committed suicide on August 17,
Rommel on October 14. Fear permeated and paralyzed the German high command in
the weeks that followed.

On July 31, 1944, the
Americans on the Allies' right, newly supported by the landing of the U.S. 3rd
Army under Patton, broke through the German defenses at Avranches, the gateway
from Normandy into Brittany. On August 7 a desperate counterattack by four
panzer divisions from Mortain, east of Avranches, failed to seal the breach, and
American tanks poured southward through the gap and flooded the open country
beyond. Though some of the U.S. forces were then swung southwestward in the hope
of seizing the Breton ports in pursuance of the original prescription of
"Overlord" and though some went on in more southerly directions toward the
crossings of the Loire, others were wheeled eastward--to trap, in the Falaise
"pocket," a large part of the German forces retreating southward from the
pressure of the Allies' left at Caen. The Americans' wide eastward flanking
maneuver after the breakout speedily produced a general collapse of the German
position in northern France.

Meanwhile, more and more
Allied troops were being landed in Normandy. On August 1, two army groups were
constituted: the 21st (comprising the British and Canadian armies) under
Montgomery; and the 12th (for the Americans) under Bradley. By the middle of
August an eastward wheel wider than that which had cut off the Falaise pocket
had brought the Americans to Argentan, southeast of Falaise and level with the
British and Canadian advance on the left (north) of the Allies' front, so that a
concerted drive eastward could now be launched; and on August 19 a U.S. division
successfully crossed the Seine at Mantes-Gassicourt. Already on August 17 the
Americans on the Loire had taken Orléans. The clandestine French Resistance in
Paris rose against the Germans on August 19; and a French division under General
Jacques Leclerc, pressing forward
from Normandy, received the surrender of the German forces there and liberated
the city on August 25.

The German forces would
have had ample time to pull back to the Seine River and to form a strong
defensive barrier line there had it not been for Hitler's stubbornly stupid
orders that there should be no withdrawal. It was his folly that enabled the
Allies to liberate France so quickly. The bulk of the German armoured forces and
many infantry divisions were thrown into the Normandy battle and kept there by
Hitler's "no withdrawal" orders until they collapsed and a large part of them
were trapped. The fragments were incapable of further resistance, and their
retreat (which was largely on foot) was soon outstripped by the British and
American mechanized columns. More than 200,000 German troops were taken prisoner
in France, and 1,200 German tanks had been destroyed in the fighting. When the
Allies approached the German border at the beginning of September, after a
sweeping drive from Normandy, there was no organized resistance to stop them
from driving on into the heart of Germany.

Meanwhile,
"Operation Dragoon" (formerly
"Anvil") was launched on Aug. 15, 1944, when the U.S. 7th Army and the French
1st Army landed on the French Riviera, where there were only four German
divisions to oppose them. While the Americans drove first into the Alps to take
Grenoble, the French took Marseille on August 23 and then advanced eastward
through France up the Rhône Valley, to be rejoined by the Americans north of
Lyon early in September. Both armies then moved swiftly northeastward into
Alsace.

In the north, however,
some discord had arisen among the Allied commanders after the crossing of the
Seine. Whereas Montgomery wanted to concentrate on a single thrust northeastward
through Belgium into the heavily industrialized Ruhr Valley (an area vital to
Germany's war effort), the U.S. generals argued for continuing to advance
eastward through France on a broad front, in accordance with the pre-invasion
plan. Eisenhower, by way of compromise, decided on August 23 that Montgomery's
drive into Belgium should have the prior claim on resources until Antwerp should
have been captured but that thereafter the pre-invasion plan should be resumed.

Consequently, Montgomery's
2nd Army began its advance on August 29, entered Brussels on September 3, took
Antwerp, with its docks intact, on September 4, and went on, three days later,
to force its way across the Albert Canal. The U.S. 1st Army, meanwhile,
supporting Montgomery on the right, had taken Namur on the day of the capture of
Antwerp and was nearing Aachen. Far to the south, however, Patton's U.S. 3rd
Army, having raced forward to take Verdun on August 31, was already beginning to
cross the Moselle River near Metz on September 5, with the obvious possibility
of achieving a breakthrough into Germany's economically important Saarland.
Eisenhower, therefore, could no longer devote a preponderance of supplies to
Montgomery at Patton's expense.

Montgomery nevertheless
attempted a thrust to cross the Rhine River at Arnhem, the British 1st Airborne
Division being dropped ahead there to clear the way for the 2nd Army; but the
Germans were just able to check the thrust, thus isolating the parachutists,
many of whom were taken prisoner. By this time, indeed, the German defense was
rapidly stiffening as the Allies approached the German frontiers: the U.S. 1st
Army spent a month grinding down the defenses of
Aachen, which fell at last on October
20 (the first city of prewar Germany to be captured by the western Allies); and
the 1st Canadian Army, on the left of the British 2nd, did not clear the Schelde
estuary west of Antwerp, including Walcheren Island, until early November.
Likewise, Patton's 3rd Army was held up before Metz.

The Allies' amazing
advance of 350 miles in a few weeks was thus brought to a halt. In early
September the U.S. and British forces had had a combined superiority of 20 to 1
in tanks and 25 to 1 in aircraft over the Germans, but by November 1944 the
Germans still held both the Ruhr Valley and the Saarland, after having been so
near collapse in the west in early September that one or the other of those
prizes could have easily been taken by the Allies. The root of the Allied
armies' sluggishness in September was that none of their top planners had
foreseen such a complete collapse of the Germans as occurred in August 1944.
They were therefore not prepared, mentally or materially, to exploit it by a
rapid offensive into Germany itself. The Germans thus obtained time to build up
their defending forces in the west, with serious consequences both for occupied
Europe and the postwar political situation of the Continent.

The Eastern Front, June-December 1944

World War
II: German and Allied
movements in Europe from the end of 1942 to 1945, and (inset) the Normandy...

After a successful
offensive against the Finns on the Karelian Isthmus had culminated in the
capture of Viipuri (Vyborg) on June 20, 1944, the Red Army on June 23 began a
major onslaught on the Germans' front in Belorussia. The attackers' right wing
took the bastion town of Vitebsk (Vitebskaya) and then wheeled southward across
the highway from Orsha to
Minsk; their left wing, under General
Konstantin Konstantinovich Rokossovsky,
broke through just north of the Pripet Marshes and then drove forward for 150
miles in a week, severing the highway farther to the west, between Minsk and
Warsaw. Minsk itself fell to the Red Army on July 3; and, though the Germans
extricated a large part of their forces from the Soviet enveloping movement, the
Soviet tanks raced ahead, bypassing any attempts to block their path, and were
deep into Lithuania and northeastern Poland by mid-July. Then the Soviet forces
south of the Pripet Marshes struck too, capturing Lwów and pushing across the
San River. This increase of pressure on the Germans enabled Rokossovsky's mobile
columns to thrust still farther westward: they reached the Vistula River, and
one of them, on July 31, even penetrated the suburbs of
Warsaw. The Polish underground in
Warsaw thereupon rose in revolt against the Germans and briefly gained control
of the city. But three SS armoured divisions arrived to suppress the revolt in
Warsaw, and the Soviet Red Army stood idly by across the Vistula while the
Germans crushed the insurrection. Although the Soviet halt outside Warsaw was a
purposeful move, it is true that the unprecedented length and speed of the Red
Army's advance--450 miles in five weeks--had overstrained the Soviet
communications. The halt on the Vistula was to last six months.

On August 20, however, two
Soviet thrusts were launched in another direction--against the German salient in
Bessarabia. A new government came to power in
Romania on August 23 and not only
suspended hostilities against the U.S.S.R. but also, on August 25, declared war
against Germany. This long-premeditated volte-face opened the way for three
great wheeling movements by the Red Army's left wing through the vast spaces of
southeastern and central Europe: southwestward across Bulgaria, where they met
no opposition; westward up the Danube Valley and over the Yugoslav frontier; and
northwestward through the Carpathians into Transylvania. The Germans could only
try to hold the threatened centres of communication long enough for the
withdrawal of their forces from Greece and from southern Yugoslavia. Belgrade
fell to a concerted action by the Red Army and Tito's Partisan forces on Oct.
20, 1944; and a rapid drive from the Transylvanian sector into the Hungarian
Plain brought Soviet forces up to the suburbs of Budapest on November 4.
Budapest, however, was stubbornly defended: by the end of the year, it was
enveloped but still holding out.

At the northern end of the
Eastern Front, Finland had capitulated early in September, and the following
weeks saw a series of scythelike strokes by the Red Army against the German
forces remaining in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. By mid-October the remnants
of those forces were cornered in Courland, but the subsequent Soviet attempt to
break through from Lithuania into East Prussia was repelled.

Air warfare, 1944

The Allies' strategic air
offensive against Germany began to attain its maximum effectiveness in the
opening months of 1944. Both the U.S. air forces concerned, namely, the 8th in
England and the 15th in Italy, were increased in numbers and improved in
technical proficiency. By the end of 1943 the 8th Bomber Command alone could
mount attacks of 700 planes, and early in 1944 regular 1,000-bomber attacks
became possible. Even more important was the arrival in Europe of effective
long-range fighters, chief of which, the
P-51 Mustang, was capable of
operating at maximum bomber range. The U.S. fighters could now get the better of
the Luftwaffe in the air over Germany, so that whereas 9.1 percent of bombers
going out had been lost and 45.6 percent damaged in October 1943, the
corresponding figures were only 3.5 percent and 29.9 percent in February 1944,
though in that very month a massive and very difficult attack at extreme range
had been made on the German aircraft industry.
Carl Spaatz, commanding general of
the U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe, in May 1944 initiated an offensive
against Germany's synthetic-oil production--an offensive that was to become more
and more harmful to the German war effort after the loss of Romania's oil fields
to the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe's resistance dwindled almost to
nothing as its fighter plane production dropped and most of its remaining
trained pilots died in aerial combat.

The
RAF Bomber Command launched nearly
10,000 sorties in March 1944 and dropped some 27,500 tons of bombs, about 70
percent of this effort being concentrated on Germany; but in the following
months its offensive was largely diverted to the intensive preparation and,
later, to the support of the Allied landings in France. Nevertheless, it joined
usefully in the U.S. offensive against German oil production, continued to play
its part in the
Battle of the Atlantic, and also
assumed the task of bombing the launching ramps of the Germans' "V" missiles. By
early 1945, the unending Allied bombing and strafing raids on bridges, roads,
rail facilities, locomotives, and supply columns had paralyzed the German
transportation system.

The "V" missiles, flying
bombs and long-range rockets, were the new weapons on which Hitler had vainly
been counting to reduce Great Britain to readiness for peace. His faith in them
had indeed been a major motive for his insistence on holding the sites, in
northernmost France, from which they were initially to be aimed at London. The
V1 missiles were first launched on
June 13, 1944, mostly from sites in the Pas-de-Calais; the
V2 missiles were launched a few
months later, on September 8, from sites in The Netherlands (after the Allies'
occupation of the Pas-de-Calais on their way to Belgium). The V2 offensive was
maintained until March 1945.

Allied policy and strategy: Octagon (Quebec II) and Moscow, 1944

The progress of the Soviet
armies toward central and southeastern Europe made it all the more urgent for
the western Allies to come to terms with Stalin about the fate of the
"liberated" countries of eastern Europe. London had already proposed to Moscow
in May 1944 that Romania and Bulgaria should be zones for Soviet military
operation, Yugoslavia and Greece--whose royalist governments in exile were under
British protection--for British; and Roosevelt had approved this proposition in
June.

The Soviet Union had in
February 1944 sent a military mission to
Tito's Communist Partisans in
Yugoslavia (the Partisans had become the sole Yugoslavian recipients, since the
Tehran Conference, of western aid, though their royalist rivals, the Chetniks,
were not publicly disavowed by Churchill until May 25). Along with this, a
would-be government of
Greece had been set up in March by
the
EAM (National Liberation Front),
which was a Communist movement controlling a military organization, the ELAS
(National Popular Liberation Army), in opposition to the
EDES (Greek Democratic National
Army), which was loyal to the British-backed government in exile. The Polish
question, moreover, was still unresolved, and in July the Soviets established,
at Lublin, a Committee of National Liberation independent of the London Poles.
In Romania, despite the government's change of side in August, the Soviets
proceeded to disband the Romanian Army; and early in September they declared war
on Bulgaria, invaded that country, and sponsored a Communist revolution there.

With this background,
Churchill and Roosevelt met again for their second
Quebec Conference, code-named
"Octagon," which lasted from
September 11 to 16. The most important decision made at the conference was that
Roosevelt and Churchill together approved the European Advisory Commission's
scheme for the division of defeated Germany into U.S., British, and Soviet zones
of occupation (the southwest, the northwest, and the east, respectively) and
also the radical plan elaborated by the U.S. secretary of the treasury,
Henry Morgenthau, Jr., for turning
Germany "into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral" without "war-making
industries." The Morgenthau Plan, however, was subsequently revoked.

The next conference of the
Allies was held in
Moscow Oct. 9-20, 1944, between
Churchill and Stalin, with U.S. ambassador
W. Averell Harriman also present at
most of their talks. Disagreement persisted over Poland. Stalin, however,
consented readily to Churchill's provisional suggestion for zones of influence
in southeastern Europe: the U.S.S.R. should be preponderant in Romania and in
Bulgaria, the western powers in Greece, and western and Soviet influences should
counterbalance one another evenly in Yugoslavia and in Hungary. The timing of
the next western and Soviet offensives against Germany was also agreed, and some
accord was reached about the scale of the eventual Soviet participation in the
war against Japan.

The Philippines and Borneo, from September 1944

On July 27-28, 1944,
Roosevelt had approved MacArthur's argument that the next objective in the
Pacific theatre of the war should be the
Philippine Archipelago (which was
comparatively near to the already conquered New Guinea). The initial steps
toward the Philippines were taken almost simultaneously, in mid-September 1944:
MacArthur's forces from New Guinea seized Morotai, the northeasternmost isle of
the Moluccas, which was on the direct route to Mindanao, southernmost landmass
of the Philippines; and Nimitz' fleet from the east landed troops in the Palau
Islands.

Already by mid-September
the Americans had discovered that the Japanese forces were unexpectedly weak not
only on Mindanao but also on
Leyte, the smaller island north of
the Surigao Strait. With this knowledge they decided to bypass Mindanao and to
begin their invasion of the Philippines on Leyte. On Oct. 17-18, 1944, American
forces seized offshore islets in
Leyte Gulf, and on October 20 they
landed four divisions on the east coast of Leyte.

The threat to Leyte was
the signal for the Japanese to put into effect their recently formulated plan
"Sho-Go" ("Operation Victory"),
whereby the Allies' next attempts at invasion were to be countered by concerted
air attacks. Though in the case of Leyte the Japanese Army and Navy air forces
in the immediate theatre numbered only 212 planes, it was hoped that the
dispatch of four carriers under Vice Admiral Ozawa, with 106 planes, southward
from Japanese waters would lure the U.S. aircraft carriers away from Leyte Gulf
and that the suicidal "kamikaze" tactics of the Japanese airmen would save the
situation. (Kamikaze
pilots deliberately crashed their bomb-armed planes into enemy ships.) At the
same time, however, a Japanese naval force from Singapore was to sail to Brunei
Bay and there split itself into two groups that would converge on Leyte Gulf
from the north and from the southwest: the stronger group, under Vice Admiral
Kurita Takeo, would enter the Pacific through the San Bernardino Strait between
the Philippine islands of Samar and Luzon; the other, under Vice Admiral
Nishimura Teiji, would pass through the Surigao Strait.

Kurita's fleet (five
battleships, 12 cruisers, 15 destroyers) lost two of its heavy cruisers to U.S.
submarine attack on October 23, when it was off Palawan; and one of the
mightiest of Japan's battleships, the Musashi, was sunk by aerial
attack the next day. On October 25, however, Kurita made his way unopposed
through the San Bernardino Strait, since the commander of the U.S. 3rd Fleet,
Admiral
Halsey, had diverted his main
strength toward the bait dangled by Ozawa farther to the north. Three groups of
U.S. escort carriers, met by Kurita on his way toward Leyte Gulf, suffered heavy
damage; but, meanwhile, Nishimura's fleet (two battleships, one heavy cruiser,
four destroyers) had been detected on its way to the Surigao Strait and, on its
entry into Leyte Gulf in the early hours of October 25, had been practically
annihilated by the U.S. 7th Fleet. Kurita consequently turned back from his
rendezvous in Leyte Gulf; and the Japanese defeat in the war's greatest naval
confrontation was sealed by Ozawa's losses to Halsey: all of his four carriers,
together with a light cruiser and two destroyers. The Japanese Navy's "Sho-Go"
as it transpired in the Battle of Leyte Gulf had not only failed to inflict
serious damage on the Americans but had resulted in serious losses for the
Japanese. These losses amounted to three battleships, one large aircraft
carrier, three light carriers, six heavy cruisers, four light cruisers, and 11
destroyers, while the United States lost only one light carrier, two escort
carriers, and three destroyers. The battle reduced the Japanese Navy to
vestigial strength and cleared the way for the U.S. occupation of the
Philippines.

Defeat in the gulf,
however, did not prevent the Japanese from landing reinforcements on the west
coast of Leyte. They put up so stubborn a resistance that the Americans
themselves had to be reinforced before Ormoc fell on Dec. 10, 1944; it was not
before December 25 that the Americans could claim control of all Leyte--though
there was still some mopping up to be done. Altogether, the defense of Leyte
cost the Japanese some 75,000 combatants killed or taken prisoner.

From Leyte the Americans
proceeded first, on December 15, to the invasion of Mindoro, the largest of the
islands immediately south of
Luzon. Kamikaze counterattacks made
this conquest more costly; and they were to be continued after the Americans had
surprised the Japanese by landing, on Jan. 9, 1945, at Lingayen Gulf on the west
coast of Luzon itself, the most important island of the Philippines. The local
Japanese commander, Lieutenant General
Yamashita Tomoyuki, with no hope of
reinforcement, opted for tying the enemy forces down as long as possible by a
static defense in three mountainous sectors--west, northwest, and east of the
Central Plains behind
Manila.

Manila itself was also
strongly defended by the Japanese. One U.S. corps, however, was approaching it
from Lingayen over the Central Plains; a second corps was landed at Subic Bay,
at the northern end of the Bataan Peninsula, on Jan. 29, 1945, to make contact
with the former corps at Dinalupihan a week later; and troops made an amphibious
landing at Nasugbu, south of Manila Bay, on January 31. Manila was then
invested, and during the siege the bay was cleared by the occupation of the
southern tip of Bataan Peninsula on February 15 and by the reduction of
Corregidor Island in the following fortnight. On March 3 Manila fell at last to
the Americans.

The Japanese resistance on
Luzon continued in the mountains, and east of Manila it went on until mid-June
1945. Mindanao, meanwhile, was likewise being reduced. A U.S. division landed at
Zamboanga, on the southwestern peninsula, on March 10, 1945, and a corps began
the occupation of the core of the island on April 17.

The last phase of the U.S.
campaign in the Philippines coincided with the opening of the reconquest of
Borneo from the Japanese, chiefly by
Australian forces. Tarakan Island, off the northeast coast, was invaded on May
1; Brunei on the northwest coast was invaded on June 10; and Balikpapan, on the
east coast far to the south of Tarakan, was attacked on July 1. The subsequent
collapse of the Japanese defenses around Balikpapan deprived Japan of the oil
supplies of southern Borneo.

Burma and China, October 1944-May 1945

Chiang Kai-shek's demand
for the recall of the talented but abrasive Stilwell was satisfied in October
1944, and some reorganization of the Allies' commands in Southeast Asia
followed. While Lieutenant General Daniel Sultan took Stilwell's place, Major
General
A.C. Wedemeyer became commander of
U.S. forces in the China theatre and Sir
Oliver Leese commander of the land
forces under Mountbatten.

On the northern wing of
the Burma front, a three-pronged drive by NCAC forces southward from Myitkyina
to the Irrawaddy River had been planned by Stilwell. Launched under Sultan, the
triple drive was at first only partially successful: the right took Indaw and
Katha early in December and effected a junction with Slim's British 14th Army,
and the centre reached Shwegu, across the river; but the left, though it took
Bhamo, was checked 60 miles west of Wan-t'ing. Sultan thereupon decided to push
farther southward, both on the right against Kyaukme, on the
Burma Road northeast of
Mandalay, and on the left against
Wan-t'ing. Threatened with envelopment, the Japanese fell back from Wan-t'ing,
which Sultan's troops promptly occupied. Convoys up the Burma Road from
Wan-t'ing to K'un-ming were resumed on Jan. 18, 1945.

For central Burma,
meanwhile, Slim had thought, after his victory at Imphal, that he must
immediately seize the crossings of the Chindwin River at Sittaung and at Kalewa
and then advance southward against Mandalay itself. He did indeed effect the
Chindwin crossings, but in mid-December 1944 he saw that the Japanese were in
any case going to withdraw altogether to the left bank of the Irrawaddy.
Thereupon, he changed his plan: his objective should rather be Meiktila, which
lay east of the Irrawaddy and was a vital centre of Japanese communications
between Mandalay and Rangoon to the south. To conceal his new intention, he
allowed one of the corps already directed against Mandalay to continue its
eastward advance, but the other corps was surreptitiously moved over a
circuitous route of 300 miles southward to Pakokku, which lay south of the
Chindwin-Irrawaddy confluence and northwest of Meiktila. While the crossing of
the Irrawaddy by the former corps on both sides of Mandalay distracted the
attention of the Japanese, the latter corps took Meiktila on March 3, 1945, and
held it against fierce counterattacks. Mandalay fell 10 days later, and the
whole area was under the 14th Army's control by the end of the month. When the
action was over, two Japanese armies had lost one-third of their fighting
strength.

It remained for Slim to
capture the Burmese capital,
Rangoon. Allied ground forces
advanced on Rangoon along two routes from the north: one corps, having moved
down the Sittang Valley east of the Irrawaddy, took Pegu; the other, moving down
the river, took Prome (Pye). The monsoon, however, was imminent, and to
forestall it a small combined operation was undertaken: parachute troops were
dropped at Elephant Point, on the coast south of Rangoon, on May 1, 1945; and an
Indian division, landing at Rangoon itself the next day, took the city without
opposition, just when the monsoon rains were beginning to fall. The recapture of
Burma was essentially complete with the taking of Rangoon.

The German offensive in the west, winter 1944-45

World War
II: German and Allied
movements in Europe from the end of 1942 to 1945, and (inset) the Normandy...

Hitler still hoped to
drive the Allies back and still adhered to his principle of concentrating on the
war in the west. Late in 1944, therefore, he assembled on the Western Front all
the manpower that had become available as a consequence of his second "total
mobilization": a decree of October 18 had raised a Volkssturm, or "home
guard," for the defense of the Third Reich, conscripting all able-bodied men
between the ages of 16 and 60 years.

In mid-November all six
Allied armies on the Western Front had launched a general offensive; but, though
the French 1st Army and the U.S. 7th had reached the Rhine River in Alsace,
there were only small gains on other sectors of the front. Meanwhile, the German
defense was being continuously strengthened with hastily shifted reserves and
with freshly raised forces, besides the troops that had managed to make their
way back from France. The German buildup along the front was by now progressing
faster than that of the Allies, despite Germany's great inferiority of material
resources. In mid-December 1944 the Germans gave the Allied armies a shock by
launching a sizable counteroffensive. The Germans amassed 24 divisions for the
attack. Under the overall command of the reinstated Rundstedt, this attack was
to be delivered through the wooded hill country of the Ardennes against the
weakest sector of the U.S.-manned front, between Monschau (southwest of Aachen)
and Echternach (northwest of Trier). While the 5th Panzer Army on the left,
under the talented commander General
Hasso von Manteuffel, with its own
left flank covered by the German 7th Army, was to wheel northwestward after the
breakthrough and to cross the Meuse River of Namur in a drive on Brussels, the
6th Panzer Army on the right, under SS General Sepp Dietrich, was to wheel more
sharply northward against the Allies' important supply port of Antwerp. Thus, it
was hoped, the British and Canadian forces at the northern end of the front
could be cut off from their supplies and crushed, while the U.S. forces to the
south were held off by the German left.

The offensive was prepared
with skill and secrecy and was launched on Dec. 16, 1944, at a time when mist
and rain would minimize the effectiveness of counteraction from the air. The
leading wedge of the attack by eight German armoured divisions along a 75-mile
front took the Allies by surprise; and the 5th Panzer Army, which achieved the
deeper penetration, reached points within 20 miles of the crossings of the Meuse
River at Givet and at Dinant. U.S. detachments, however, stood firm, albeit
outflanked, at Bastogne and at other bottlenecks in the Ardennes; and there
followed what is popularly remembered as the
Battle of the Bulge. By December 24
the German drive had narrowed but deepened, having penetrated about 65 miles
into the Allied lines along a 20-mile front. But by this time the Allies had
begun to respond. Montgomery, who had taken charge of the situation in the
north, swung his reserves southward to forestall the Germans on the Meuse.
Bradley, commanding the Allied forces south of the German wedge, sent his 3rd
Army under Patton to the relief of Bastogne, which was accomplished on December
26. The weather cleared, and as many as 5,000 Allied aircraft began to bomb and
strafe the German forces and their supply system. During Jan. 8-16, 1945, the
German attackers were compelled to withdraw, lest the salient that they had
driven into the Allied front be cut off in its turn. Though their abortive
offensive inflicted much damage and upset the Allies' plans, the Germans spent
too much of their strength on it and thereby forfeited whatever chance they had
had of maintaining prolonged resistance later. The Germans sustained 120,000
casualties and the Americans sustained about 75,000 in the Battle of the Bulge.

The Soviet advance to the Oder, January-February 1945

World War
II: German and Allied
movements in Europe from the end of 1942 to 1945, and (inset) the Normandy...

At the end of 1944
the Germans still held the western half of Poland, and their front was still 200
miles east of where it had been at the start of the war in 1939. The Germans had
checked the Soviets' summer offensive and had established a firm line along the
Narew and Vistula rivers southward to the Carpathians, and in October they
repelled the Red Army's attempted thrust into East Prussia. Meanwhile, however,
the Soviet left, moving up from the eastern Balkans, had been gradually pushing
around through Hungary and Yugoslavia in a vast flanking movement; and the
absorption of German forces in opposing this side-door approach detracted
considerably from the Germans' capacity to maintain their main Eastern and
Western fronts.

The Soviet high command
was now ready to exploit the fundamental weaknesses of the German situation.
Abundant supplies for their armies had been accumulated at the railheads. The
mounting stream of American-supplied trucks had by this time enabled the Soviets
to motorize a much larger proportion of their infantry brigades and thus, with
the increasing production of their own tanks, to multiply the number of armoured
and mobile corps for a successful breakthrough.

Before the end of December
ominous reports were received by
Guderian--who, in this desperately
late period of the war, had been made chief of the German general staff. German
Army intelligence reported that 225 Soviet infantry divisions and 22 armoured
corps had been identified on the front between the Baltic and the Carpathians,
assembled to attack. But when Guderian presented the report of these massive
Soviet offensive preparations, Hitler refused to believe it, exclaiming: "It's
the biggest imposture since Genghis Khan! Who is responsible for producing all
this rubbish?"

If Hitler had been willing
to stop the Ardennes counteroffensive in the west, troops could have been
transferred to the Eastern Front; but he refused to do so. At the same time he
refused Guderian's renewed request that the 30 German divisions now isolated in
Courland (on the Baltic seacoast in Lithuania) should be evacuated by sea and
brought back to reinforce the gateways into Germany. As a consequence, Guderian
was left with a mobile reserve of only 12 armoured divisions to back up the 50
weak infantry divisions stretched out over the 700 miles of the main front.

The Soviet offensive
opened on Jan. 12, 1945, when Konev's armies were launched against the German
front in southern Poland, starting from their bridgehead over the Vistula River
near Sandomierz. After it had pierced the German defense and produced a flanking
menace to the central sector, Zhukov's armies in the centre of the front bounded
forward from their bridgeheads nearer Warsaw. That same day, January 14,
Rokossovsky's armies also joined in the offensive, striking from the Narew River
north of Warsaw and breaking through the defenses covering this flank approach
to East Prussia. The breach in the German front was now 200 miles wide.

On Jan. 17, 1945, Warsaw
was captured by Zhukov, after it had been surrounded; and on January 19 his
armoured spearheads drove into Lódz. That same day Konev's
spearheads reached the Silesian frontier of prewar Germany. Thus, at the end of
the first week the offensive had been carried 100 miles deep and was 400 miles
wide--far too wide to be filled by such scanty reinforcements as were belatedly
provided.

The crisis made Hitler
renounce any idea of pursuing his offensive in the west; but, despite Guderian's
advice, he switched the 6th Panzer Army not to Poland but to Hungary in an
attempt to relieve Budapest. The Soviets could thus continue their advance
through Poland for two more weeks. While Konev's spearheads crossed the Oder
River in the vicinity of Breslau (Wroclaw) and thus cut Silesia's
important mineral resources off from Germany, Zhukov made a sweeping advance in
the centre by driving forward from Warsaw, past Poznan, Bydgoszcz, and
Torun, to the frontiers of Brandenburg and of Pomerania. At the same time
Rokossovsky pushed on, through Allenstein (Olsztyn), to the Gulf of Danzig, thus
cutting off the 25 German divisions in East Prussia. To defend the yawning gap
in the centre of the front, Hitler created a new army group and put Heinrich
Himmler in command of it with a staff of favoured SS officers. Their fumbling
helped to clear the path for Zhukov, whose mechanized forces by Jan. 31, 1945,
were at Küstrin, on the lower Oder, only 40 miles from
Berlin.

Zhukov's advance now came
to a halt. Konev, however, could still make a northwesterly sweep down the left
bank of the middle Oder, reaching Sommerfeld, 80 miles from Berlin, on February
13, and the Neisse River two days later. The Germans' defense benefited from
being driven back to the straight and shortened line formed by the Oder and
Neisse rivers. This front, extending from the Baltic coast to the Bohemian
frontier, was less than 200 miles long. The menace of the Soviets' imminent
approach to Berlin led Hitler to decide that most of his fresh drafts of troops
must be sent to reinforce the Oder; the way was thus eased for the crossing of
the Rhine River by the American and British armies.

On Feb. 13, 1945, the
Soviets took Budapest, the defense of which had entailed the Germans' loss of
Silesia.

Roosevelt's last meeting
with Stalin and Churchill took place at Yalta, in the Crimea, Feb. 4-11, 1945.
The conference is chiefly remembered for its treatment of the Polish problem:
the western Allied leaders, abandoning their support of the Polish government in
London, agreed that the Lublin committee--already recognized as the provisional
government of Poland by the Soviet masters of the country--should be the nucleus
of a provisional government of national unity, pending free elections. But while
they also agreed that Poland should be compensated in the west for the eastern
territories that the U.S.S.R. had seized in 1939, they declined to approve the
Oder-Neisse line as a frontier
between Poland and Germany, considering that it would put too many Germans under
Polish rule. For the rest of "liberated Europe" the western Allied leaders
obtained nothing more substantial from Stalin than a declaration prescribing
support for "democratic elements" and "free elections" to produce "governments
responsive to the will of the people."

For Germany the conference
affirmed the project for dividing the country into occupation zones, with the
difference that the U.S. zone was to be reduced in order to provide a fourth
zone, for the French to occupy. Roosevelt and Churchill, however, had already
discarded the Morgenthau Plan for the postwar treatment of Germany; and Yalta
found no comprehensive formula to replace it. The three leaders simply pledged
themselves to furnish the defeated Germans with the necessities for survival; to
"eliminate or control" all German industry that could be used for armaments; to
bring major war criminals to trial; and to set up a commission in Moscow for the
purpose of determining what reparation Germany should pay.

The German collapse, spring 1945

World War
II: German and Allied
movements in Europe from the end of 1942 to 1945, and (inset) the Normandy...

Before their ground
forces were ready for the final assault on Germany, the western Allies
intensified their aerial bombardment. This offensive culminated in a series of
five attacks on
Dresden, launched by the RAF with 800
aircraft in the night of Feb. 13-14, 1945, and continued by the U.S. 8th Air
Force with 400 aircraft in daylight on February 14, with 200 on February 15,
with 400 again on March 2, and, finally, with 572 on April 17. The motive of
these raids was allegedly to promote the Soviet advance by destroying a centre
of communications important to the German defense of the Eastern Front; but, in
fact, the raids achieved nothing to help the Red Army militarily and succeeded
in obliterating the greater part of one of the most beautiful cities of Europe
and in killing at least 35,000 people and perhaps 135,000.

The main strength of the
ground forces being built up meanwhile for the crossing of the Rhine was
allotted to Montgomery's armies on the northern sector of the front. Meanwhile,
some of the U.S. generals sought to demonstrate the abilities of their own less
generously supplied forces. Thus, Patton's 3rd Army reached the Rhine at Coblenz
(Koblenz) early in March, and, farther downstream, General Courtney H. Hodges'
1st Army seized the bridge over the Rhine at Remagen south of Bonn and actually
crossed the river, while, still farther downstream, Lieutenant General William
H. Simpson's 9th Army reached the Rhine near Düsseldorf. All three armies were
ordered to mark time until Montgomery's grand assault was ready; but, meanwhile,
they cleared the west bank of the river, and eventually, in the night of March
22-23, the 3rd Army crossed the Rhine at Oppenheim, between Mainz and Mannheim,
almost unopposed.

At last, in the night of
March 23-24, Montgomery's attack by 25 divisions was launched across a
stretch--30 miles long--of the Rhine near Wesel after a stupendous bombardment
by more than 3,000 guns and waves of attacks by bombers. Resistance was
generally slight; but Montgomery would not sanction a further advance until his
bridgeheads were consolidated into a salient 20 miles deep. Then the Canadian
1st Army, on the left, drove ahead through The Netherlands, the British 2nd went
northeastward to Lübeck and to Wismar on the Baltic, and the U.S. armies swept
forward across Germany, fanning out to reach an arc that stretched from
Magdeburg (9th Army) through Leipzig (1st) to the borders of Czechoslovakia
(3rd) and of Austria (7th and French 1st).

Guderian had tried to
shift Germany's forces eastward to hold the Red Army off; but Hitler, despite
his anxiety for Berlin, still wished to commit the 11th and 12th armies--formed
from his last reserves--to driving the western Allies back over the Rhine and,
on March 28, replaced Guderian with General Hans Krebs as chief of the general
staff.

The dominant desire of the
Germans now, both troops and civilians, was to see the British and American
armies sweep eastward as rapidly as possible to reach Berlin and occupy as much
of the country as possible before the Soviets overcame the Oder line. Few of
them were inclined to assist Hitler's purpose of obstruction by
self-destruction. On March 19 (the eve of the Rhine crossing), Hitler had issued
an order declaring that "the battle should be conducted without consideration
for our own population." His regional commissioners were instructed to destroy
"all industrial plants, all the main electricity works, waterworks, gas works"
together with "all food and clothing stores" in order to create "a desert" in
the Allies' path. When his minister of war production,
Albert Speer, protested against this
drastic order, Hitler retorted: "If the war is lost, the German nation will also
perish. So there is no need to consider what the people require for continued
existence." Appalled at such callousness, Speer was shaken out of his loyalty to
Hitler: he went behind Hitler's back to the army and industrial chiefs and
persuaded them, without much difficulty, to evade executing Hitler's decree. The
Americans and the British, driving eastward from the Rhine, met little
opposition and reached the Elbe River 60 miles from Berlin, on April 11. There
they halted.

On the Eastern Front,
Zhukov enlarged his bridgehead across the Oder early in March. On their far left
the Soviets reached Vienna on April 6; and on the right they took Königsberg on
April 9. Then, on April 16, Zhukov resumed the offensive in conjunction with
Konev, who forced the crossings of the Neisse; this time the Soviets burst out
of their bridgeheads, and within a week they were driving into the suburbs of
Berlin. Hitler chose to stay in his threatened capital, counting on some miracle
to bring salvation and clutching at such straws as the news of the death of
Roosevelt on April 12. By April 25
the armies of Zhukov and Konev had completely encircled Berlin, and on the same
day they linked up with the Americans on the Elbe River.

Isolated and reduced to
despair,
Hitler married his mistress,
Eva Braun, during the night of April
28-29, and on April 30 he committed suicide with her in the ruins of the
Chancellery, as the advancing Soviet troops were less than a half mile from his
bunker complex; their bodies were hurriedly cremated in the garden. The
"strategy" of Hitler's successor,
Dönitz, was one of capitulation and
of saving as many as possible of the westward-fleeing civilians and of his
German troops from
Soviet hands. During the interval of
surrender, 1,800,000 German troops (55 percent of the Army of the East) were
transferred into the British-U.S. area of control.

On the
Italian front, the Allied armies had
long been frustrated by the depletion of their forces for the sake of other
enterprises; but early in 1945 four German divisions were transferred from
Kesselring's command to the
Western Front, and in April the thin
German defenses in Italy were broken by an Allied attack. A surrender document
that had been signed on April 29 (while Hitler was still alive) finally brought
the fighting to a conclusion on May 2.

The surrender of the
German forces in northwestern Europe was signed at
Montgomery's headquarters on
Lüneburg Heath on May 4; and a
further document, covering all the
German forces, was signed with more
ceremony at Eisenhower's headquarters at
Reims, in the presence of
Soviet as well as
U.S.,
British, and French delegations. At
midnight on May 8, 1945, the war in Europe was officially over.

The last inter-Allied
conference of World War II, code-named "Terminal," was held at the suburb of
Potsdam, outside ruined Berlin, from July 17 to Aug. 2, 1945. It was attended by
the Soviet, U.S., and British heads of government and foreign ministers:
respectively, Stalin and Molotov; President
Harry S. Truman (Roosevelt's
successor) and James F. Byrnes; and Churchill and Eden, the last-named pair
being replaced by Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin after Great Britain's change
of government following a general election.

Operations against Japan
were discussed, and the successful testing of an atomic bomb in the United
States was divulged to Stalin. Pending the Soviet entry into the war against
Japan, a declaration was issued on July 26 calling on Japan to surrender
unconditionally and forecasting the territorial spoliation of the empire and the
military occupation of Japan proper as well as the prosecution of war criminals,
yet still promising that the Japanese people would not be enslaved or the nation
destroyed.

Time was spent discussing
the peace settlement and its procedure. Stalin induced Truman and Attlee to
consent provisionally to the Soviet Union's demands that it should take
one-third of Germany's naval and merchant fleet; have the right to exact
reparations from its occupied zones of Germany and of Austria and also from
Finland, Hungary, Romania, and even Bulgaria; and should furthermore receive a
percentage of reparation from the western-occupied zones. The total amounts of
all these exactions were, however, to be determined at a later date.

There was a profound
disagreement at the conference about the Balkan areas occupied by the Red Army
in which representatives of the western powers were allowed little say, and
about the area east of the Oder-Neisse line, all of which the Soviets had
arbitrarily put under Polish administration. The western statesmen protested at
these lone-handed arrangements but perforce accepted them.

The end of the Japanese war, February-September 1945

While the campaign for the
Philippines was still in progress, U.S. forces were making great steps in the
direct advance toward their final objective, the Japanese homeland. Aerial
bombardment was, of course, the prerequisite of the projected invasion of
Japan--which was to begin, it was imagined, with landings on Kyushu, the
southernmost of the major Japanese islands.

Iwo Jima and the bombing of Tokyo

With U.S. forces firmly
established in the Mariana Islands, the steady long-range bombing of Japan by
B-29s under the command of General
Curtis E. LeMay continued throughout
the closing months of 1944 and into 1945. But it was still 1,500 miles from
Saipan to Tokyo, a long flight even for the B-29s. Strategic planners therefore
fixed their attention on the little volcanic island of
Iwo Jima in the Bonin Islands, which
lay about halfway between the Marianas and Japan. If Iwo Jima could be
eliminated as a Japanese base, the island could then be immensely valuable as a
base for U.S. fighter planes defending the big bombers.

The Japanese were
determined to hold Iwo Jima. As they had done on other Pacific islands, they had
created underground defenses there, making the best possible use of natural
caves and the rough, rocky terrain. The number of Japanese defenders on the
island, under command of Lieutenant General Kuribayashi Tadamichi, was more than
20,000.

Day after day before the
actual landing the island was subjected to intense bombardment by naval guns, by
rockets, and by air strikes using
napalm bombs. But the results fell
far short of expectations. The Japanese were so well protected that no amount of
conventional bombing or shelling could knock them out. U.S. Marines landed on
Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945, and encountered an obstinate resistance. Meanwhile,
kamikaze counterattacks from the air sank the light carrier Bismarck Sea
and damaged other ships; and, though the U.S. flag was planted on Mount
Suribachi on February 23, the isle was not finally secured until March 16. Iwo
Jima had cost the lives of 6,000 Marines, as well as the lives of nearly all the
Japanese defenders; but in the next five months more than 2,000 B-29 bombers
were able to land on it.

Meanwhile, a new tactic
had been found for the
bombing of Japan from bases in the
Marianas. Instead of high-altitude strikes in daylight, which had failed to do
much damage to the industrial centres attacked, low-level strikes at night,
using napalm firebombs, were tried, with startling success. The first, in the
night of March 9-10, 1945, against
Tokyo, destroyed about 25 percent of
the city's buildings (most of them flimsily built of wood and plaster), killed
more than 80,000 people, and made 1,000,000 homeless. This result indicated that
Japan might be defeated without a massive invasion by ground troops, and so
similar bombing raids on such major cities as Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe,
Yokohama, and Toyama followed. Japan literally was being bombed out of the war.

Plans for invasion,
however, were not immediately discarded. Okinawa, largest of the Ryukyu Islands
strung out northeastward from Taiwan, had been regarded as the last
stepping-stone to be taken toward Kyushu, which was only 350 miles away from it.
It had therefore been subjected to a series of air raids from October 1944,
culminating in March 1945 in an attack that destroyed hundreds of Japanese
planes; but there were still at least 75,000 Japanese troops on the island,
commanded by Lieutenant General Ushijima Mitsuru. The invasion of Okinawa was,
in fact, to be the largest amphibious operation mounted by the Americans in the
Pacific war.

Under the overall command
of Nimitz, with Admiral
Raymond Spruance in charge of the
actual landings and with Lieutenant General
Simon Bolivar Buckner commanding the
ground forces, the operation began with the occupation of the Kerama Islets, 15
miles west of Okinawa, on March 26, 1945. Five days later a landing was made on
Keise-Jima, whence artillery fire could be brought to bear on Okinawa itself.
Then, on April 1, some 60,000 U.S. troops landed on the central stretch of
Okinawa's west coast, seizing two nearby airfields and advancing to cut the
island's narrow waist. Koiso's government in Tokyo resigned on April 5, and the
U.S.S.R. on the same day refused to renew its treaty of nonaggression with
Japan.

The first major
counterattack on Okinawa by the Japanese, begun on April 6, involved not only
355 kamikaze air raids but also the Yamato, the greatest battleship
in the world (72,000 tons, with nine 18.1-inch [460-millimetre] guns), which was
sent out on a suicidal mission with only enough fuel for the single outward
voyage and without sufficient air cover. The Japanese hoped the Yamato
might finish off the Allied fleet after the latter had been weakened by kamikaze
attacks. In the event, the Yamato was hit repeatedly by bombs and
torpedoes and was sunk on April 7. Equally suicidal was a new Japanese weapon,
baka, which claimed its first
victim, the U.S. destroyer Abele, off Okinawa on April 12. Baka
was a rocket-powered glider crammed with explosives which was towed into range
by a bomber and was then released to be guided by its solitary pilot into the
chosen target for their mutual destruction.

The U.S. ground forces
invading Okinawa met little opposition on the beaches because Ushijima had
decided to offer his main resistance inland, out of range of the enemy's naval
guns. In the southern half of the island this resistance was bitterest: it
lasted until June 21, and Ushijima killed himself the next day. The campaign for
Okinawa was ended officially on July 2. For U.S. troops it had been the longest
and bloodiest Pacific campaign since Guadalcanal in 1942. Taking the island had
cost the Americans 12,000 dead and 36,000 wounded, with 34 ships sunk and 368
damaged, and the Japanese losses exceeded 100,000 dead.

On April 3, 1945, two days
after the first landing on Okinawa, the U.S. command in the Pacific was
reorganized: MacArthur was henceforth to be in command of all army units and
also in operational control of the U.S. Marines for the invasion of Japan;
Nimitz was placed in command of all navy units.

Throughout July 1945 the
Japanese mainlands, from the latitude of Tokyo on Honshu northward to the coast
of Hokkaido, were bombed just as if an invasion was about to be launched. In
fact, something far more sinister was in hand, as the Americans were telling
Stalin at Potsdam.

In 1939 physicists in the
United States had learned of experiments in Germany demonstrating the
possibility of
nuclear fission and had understood
that the potential energy might be released in an explosive weapon of
unprecedented power. On Aug. 2, 1939, Albert Einstein had warned Roosevelt of
the danger of Nazi Germany's forestalling other states in the development of an
atomic bomb. Eventually, the U.S.
Office of Scientific Research and Development
was created in June 1941 and given joint responsibility with the war department
in the
Manhattan Project to develop a
nuclear bomb. After four years of intensive and ever-mounting research and
development efforts, an atomic device was set off on July 16, 1945, in a desert
area at Alamogordo, N.M., generating an explosive power equivalent to that of
more than 15,000 tons of TNT. Thus the
atomic bomb was born. Truman, the new
U.S. president, calculated that this monstrous weapon might be used to defeat
Japan in a way less costly of U.S. lives than a conventional invasion of the
Japanese homeland. Japan's unsatisfactory response to the Allies' Potsdam
Declaration decided the matter. On Aug. 6, 1945, an atomic bomb carried from
Tinian Island in the Marianas in a specially equipped B-29 was dropped on
Hiroshima, at the southern end of Honshu: the combined heat and blast pulverized
everything in the explosion's immediate vicinity, generated spontaneous fires
that burned almost 4.4 square miles completely out, and killed between 70,000
and 80,000 people, besides injuring more than 70,000 others. A second bomb,
dropped on
Nagasaki on August 9, killed between
35,000 and 40,000 people, injured a like number, and devastated 1.8 square
miles.

The Japanese surrender

News of Hiroshima's
destruction was only slowly understood in Tokyo. Many members of the Japanese
government did not appreciate the power of the new Allied weapon until after the
Nagasaki attack. Meanwhile, on August 8, the U.S.S.R. had declared war against
Japan. The combination of these developments tipped the scales within the
government in favour of a group that had, since the spring, been advocating a
negotiated peace. On August 10 the Japanese government issued a statement
agreeing to accept the surrender terms of the
Potsdam Declaration on the
understanding that the emperor's position as a sovereign ruler would not be
prejudiced. In their reply the Allies granted Japan's request that the emperor's
sovereign status be maintained, subject only to their supreme commander's
directives. Japan accepted this proviso on August 14, and the emperor
Hirohito urged his people to accept
the decision to surrender. It was a bitter pill to swallow, though, and every
effort was made to persuade the Japanese to accept the defeat that they had come
to regard as unthinkable. Even princes of the Japanese Imperial house were
dispatched to deliver the Emperor's message in person to distant Japanese Army
forces in China and in Korea, hoping thus to mitigate the shock. A clique of
diehards nevertheless attempted to assassinate the new prime minister, Admiral
Suzuki Kantaro; but by September 2, when the formal surrender ceremonies
took place, the way had been smoothed.

Truman designated MacArthur as the
Allied powers' supreme commander to accept Japan's formal surrender, which was
solemnized aboard the U.S. flagship Missouri in Tokyo Bay: the
Japanese foreign minister,
Shigemitsu Mamoru, signed the
document first, on behalf of the Emperor and his government. He was followed by
General Umezu Yoshijiro on behalf of the Imperial General Headquarters. The
document was then signed by
MacArthur,
Nimitz, and representatives of the
other Allied powers.
Japan concluded a separate surrender
ceremony with China in Nanking on Sept. 9, 1945. With this last formal
surrender, World War II came to an end.

Costs of the war

Killed, wounded, prisoners, or missing.

The statistics on World
War II casualties are inexact. Only for the United States and the British
Commonwealth can official figures showing killed, wounded, prisoners or missing
for the armed forces be cited with any degree of assurance. For most other
nations, only estimates of varying reliability exist. Statistical accounting
broke down in both Allied and Axis nations when whole armies were surrendered or
dispersed. Guerrilla warfare, changes in international boundaries, and mass
shifts in population vastly complicated postwar efforts to arrive at accurate
figures even for the total dead from all causes.

Civilian deaths from land
battles, aerial bombardment, political and racial executions, war-induced
disease and famine, and the sinking of ships probably exceeded battle
casualties. These civilian deaths are even more difficult to determine, yet they
must be counted in any comparative evaluation of national losses. There are no
reliable figures for the casualties of the Soviet Union and China, the two
countries in which casualties were undoubtedly greatest. Mainly for this reason,
estimates of total dead in World War II vary anywhere from 35,000,000 to
60,000,000--a statistical difference of no small import. Few have ventured even
to try to calculate the total number of persons who were wounded or permanently
disabled.

However inexact many of
the figures, their main import is clear. The heaviest proportionate human losses
occurred in eastern Europe where Poland lost perhaps 20 percent of its prewar
population, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union around 10 percent. German losses, of
which the greater proportion occurred on the Eastern Front, were only slightly
less severe. The nations of western Europe, however great their suffering from
occupation, escaped with manpower losses that were hardly comparable with those
of World War I. In East Asia, the victims of famine and pestilence in China are
to be numbered in the millions, in addition to other millions of both soldiers
and civilians who perished in battle and bombardment.

The
Table contains what appear to be the
best available statistics on armed forces casualties of all types resulting from
battle, of civilian deaths from war-related causes, and estimated total deaths
in each of the major nations involved in World War II. Figures rounded to
thousands (and this device has been employed in all cases for total deaths) are
estimates of varying reliability while omissions in any category indicate that
any estimate would be the wildest of conjectures. Estimated casualties of
resistance movements have been included in military figures, other victims of
Nazi persecution in the civilian ones. In the latter category fall about
5,700,000 Jews, more than half of them from Poland, who died in Nazi
concentration and death camps.

Human and material cost

There can be no real
statistical measurement of the human and material cost of World War II. The
money cost to governments involved has been estimated at more than
$1,000,000,000,000 but this figure cannot represent the human misery,
deprivation, and suffering, the dislocation of peoples and of economic life, or
the sheer physical destruction of property that the war involved.

Europe

The Nazi overlords of
occupied Europe drained their conquered territories of resources to feed the
German war machine. Industry and agriculture in France, Belgium, The
Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway were forced to produce to meet German needs
with a resulting deprivation of their own peoples. Italy, though at first a
German ally, fared no better. The resources of the occupied territories in
eastern Europe were even more ruthlessly exploited. Millions of able-bodied men
and women were drained away to perform forced labour in German factories and on
German farms. The whole system of German economic exploitation was enforced by
cruel and brutal methods, and the guerrilla resistance it aroused was
destructive in itself and provoked German reprisals that were even more
destructive, particularly in Poland, Yugoslavia, and the occupied portions of
the Soviet Union.

Great Britain, which
escaped the ravages of occupation, suffered heavily from the German aerial blitz
of 1940-41 and later from V-bombs and rockets. On the other side, German cities
were leveled by Allied bombers, and in the final invasion of Germany from both
east and west there was much retaliatory devastation, destruction, and pillage.

The destruction of
physical plant was immense and far exceeded that of World War I, when it was
largely confined to battle areas. France estimated the total cost at an amount
equivalent to three times the total French annual national income. Belgium and
The Netherlands suffered damage roughly in similar proportions to their
resources. In Great Britain about 30 percent of the homes were destroyed or
damaged; in France, Belgium, and The Netherlands about 20 percent. Agriculture
in all the occupied countries suffered heavily from the destruction of
facilities and farm animals, the lack of machinery and fertilizers, and the
drain on manpower. Internal transport systems were completely disrupted by the
destruction or confiscation of rail cars, locomotives, and barges, and the
bombing of bridges and key rail centres. By 1945 the economies of the
continental nations of western Europe were in a state of virtually complete
paralysis.

In eastern Europe the
devastation was even worse. Poland reported 30 percent of its buildings
destroyed, as well as 60 percent of its schools, scientific institutions, and
public administration facilities, 30-35 percent of its agricultural property,
and 32 percent of its mines, electrical power, and industries. Yugoslavia
reported 20.7 percent of its dwellings destroyed. In the battlegrounds of the
western portion of the Soviet Union, the destruction was even more complete. In
Germany itself, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey found that in 49 of the
largest cities, 39 percent of the dwelling units were destroyed or seriously
damaged. Central business districts had generally been reduced to rubble,
leaving only suburban rings standing around a destroyed core.

Millions throughout Europe
were rendered homeless. There were an estimated 21,000,000 refugees, more than
half of them "displaced persons" who had been deported from their homelands to
perform forced labour. Other millions who had remained at home were physically
exhausted by five years of strain, suffering, and undernourishment. The roads of
Europe were swamped by refugees all through 1945 and into 1946 as more than
5,000,000 Soviet prisoners of war and forced labourers returned eastward to
their homeland and more than 8,000,000 Germans fled or were evacuated westward
out of the Soviet-occupied portions of Germany. Millions of other persons of
almost every European nationality also returned to their own countries or
emigrated to new homes in other lands.

The Far East

The devastation of World
War II in China was inflicted on a country that was already suffering from the
economic ills of overpopulation, underdevelopment, and a half-century of war,
political disunity, and unrest. The territory occupied by Japanese forces was
roughly equivalent to that occupied by the Axis in Europe and the period of
occupation was longer. That area of China unoccupied by the Japanese was
virtually cut off from the outside world after the Japanese conquest of Burma in
early 1942, and its economy continually tottered on the brink of collapse. In
both areas, famines, epidemics, and civil unrest were recurrent, much farmland
was flooded, and millions of refugees fled their homes, some several times.
Cities, towns, and villages were laid waste by aerial bombardment and marching
armies. The transportation system, poor to begin with, was thoroughly disrupted.
Most of the limited number of hospitals and health institutions in China were
destroyed or lost.

In India famine was
recurrent, and the Indian economy was severely strained to support the burden
the Allied military authorities placed upon it. The Philippines suffered from
three years of Japanese occupation and exploitation and from the destruction
wrought in the reconquest of the islands by the Americans in 1944-45. The
harbour at Manila was wrecked by the retreating Japanese, and many portions of
the city were demolished by bombardment.

In Japan the U.S.
Strategic Bombing Survey found the damage to urban centres comparable to that in
Germany. In the aggregate, 40 percent of the built-up areas of 66 Japanese
cities was destroyed, and approximately 30 percent of the entire urban
population of Japan lost their homes and many of their possessions. Hiroshima
and Nagasaki suffered the peculiar and lasting damage done by atomic explosion
and radiation.

Bibliography

Good summaries of the
origins of World II include Joachim Remak, The Origins of the Second World
War (1976); and Anthony P. Adamthwaite, The Making of the Second World
War (1979). The origins of the war in the Pacific are treated in Herbert
Feis, The Road to Pearl Harbor: The Coming of the War Between the United
States and Japan (1950, reprinted 1971). The classic comprehensive military
histories of the war are Basil Henry Liddell Hart, History of the Second
World War (1970, reissued 1979); J.F.C. Fuller, The Second World War,
1939-45: A Strategical and Tactical History (1948, reprinted 1968). An
excellent overall history of Europe during the war is Gordon Wright, The
Ordeal of Total War, 1939-45 (1968). The first phase of the war is treated
in John Lukacs, The Last European War, 1939-1941 (1976). Treatments of
the war in the Pacific include John Costello, The Pacific War (1981);
Akira Iriye, Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War, 1941-1945
(1981); and William Craig, The Fall of Japan (1967, reissued 1979). The
standard naval histories are S.W. Roskill, The War at Sea, 1939-1945, 3
vol. in 4 (1954-61); and Friedrich Ruge, Der Seekrieg: The German Navy's
Story, 1939-1945 (1957; U.K. title, Sea Warfare, 1939-1945: A German
Viewpoint; originally published in German, 1954). Aerial operations are
treated in R.J. Overy, The Air War, 1939-1945 (1980, reprinted 1987); and
Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against
Germany, 1939-1945, 4 vol. (1961). Allied cooperation and diplomacy are treated
in William Hardy McNeill, America, Britain, and Russia: Their Cooperation and
Conflict, 1941-1946 (1953, reprinted 1970); Herbert Feis, Churchill,
Roosevelt, Stalin: The War They Waged and the Peace They Sought, 2nd ed.
(1967); and Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain,
and the War Against Japan, 1941-1945 (1978). Decisions concerning the atomic
bomb are outlined in Herbert Feis, The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War
II, rev. ed. (1966); and Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: The Atomic
Bomb and the Grand Alliance (1975, reprinted 1987).